US sends $15 billion in arms to Iraq in 2014

After the Iraqi military collapsed in the face of the blitzkrieg ISIS launched over the summer, the United States has been trying to rebuild Iraq’s security forces. In 2014, the U.S. government approved almost $15 billion worth of arms shipments to Iraq.

Now a report has emerged in Bloomberg View which reveals that some of the weapons aren’t reaching the Iraqi military and national police, but are instead going to people the U.S. never intended to have them.

According to the report, some of the weapons intended for the Iraqi security forces are winding up in the hands of Iranian-backed militias.

U.S. weapons intended for Iraq’s beleaguered military are winding up in the possession of the country’s Shiite militias, according to U.S. lawmakers and senior officials in the Barack Obama administration. These sources say that the Baghdad government, which was granted $1.2 billion in training and equipment aid in the omnibus spending bill passed last month, is turning hardware over to Shiite militias that are heavily influenced by Iran and have been guilty of gross human-rights violations.

One senior administration official told us that the U.S. government is aware of this, but is caught in a dilemma. The flawed Iraqi security forces are unable to fight Islamic State without the aid of the militias, who are often trained and sometimes commanded by officers from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Bloomberg View has published pictures taken by a man identifying himself as a member of Kata’ib Hezbollah. Thafer Hashm  posted the images on his Facebook profile, and they seem to confirm the story.

They sold them or they gave them?

I just assume we gave them the arms.  I suppose it's possible we traded oil for them.

Let's hope THIS TIME they have the firing pins still intact-The last batch couldn't be used because the firing pins had been removed-