Journalist reveals how arms experts tracked down illicit US supplies to Iraq ISIS workshop

A story published by Wired reveals that an EU-funded group of arms experts went to Iraq and Syria to explore Islamic State’s well-oiled manufacturing machine, only to find that the US routinely violated arms control clauses.


This week the Conflict Armament Research (CAR), a London-based organization partly funded by the European Union, published a 200-page report that summarizes three years of work done by its field teams in Iraq. CAR experts were documenting the weapons Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) used on battlefields and how exactly it acquired them. In a story published by Wired, writer Brian Castner, a former Explosive Ordnance Disposal officer and veteran of the Iraq War, recounts his experience of following CAR field expert Damien Spleeters as he gathered evidence in the Iraqi city of Tal Afar.

CAR field research is about finding weapons and weapon components, documenting markings and tracing the weapons back to their country of origin and origin through tell-tale signs like particular shades of paint. Serial numbers allowed the group to confirm numerous cases in which weapons produced by EU members like Romania and Bulgaria, and purchased by the US and Saudi Arabia, ended up in the hands of IS.

Spleeters was the one who discovered a batch of dismantled Romanian PG-9 73mm rocket-propelled grenades in Tal Afar. The batch had been sold to the US in 2014 and later apparently sent to Syria to arm a group called Jaysh Suriyah al-Jadid in violation of clauses forbidding re-export of the weapons. The Romanian government has provided CAR with documents confirming both the delivery and the fact that the US signed an end-use certificate. This case is not an isolated incident; several others are detailed in the CAR report......https://on.rt.com/8v0o
 17/12/17