The Islamic State (ISIS) group may stand alone in its brutality in Iraq and Syria, where it orchestrated civilian massacres and suicide bombings and salted people’s homes with thousands of improvised explosives. But a new report, three years in the making, describes the group as shrewd manufacturing and logistical planners who moved weapons, munitions and bombmaking materials throughout the war zone on a scale unprecedented for a terror organization.
Conflict Armament Research (CAR), a weapons-tracking group based in Britain, documented more than 40,000 firearms and munitions across Iraq and Syria by dispatching field investigators in an arc stretching from the northern Syrian city of Kobane to south of Baghdad, Iraq’s capital — a rough tracing of the group’s path to conquer wide swaths of territory and establish its caliphate. The report, which the researchers call the most comprehensive to date about how the group obtained and fielded its weapons, was published Thursday and could become a vital tool for understanding the terror group’s deadly industrial proficiency. Here are a few takeaways:
• ISIS used rockets supplied by the United States — possibly in violation of agreements with weapons makers.
As The Washington Post reported in July, the Trump administration ended a secretive CIA operation to arm moderate Syrian rebels battling President Bashar Assad. Few details on what arms they received are known publicly, but researchers found numerous rockets in Iraq that appear to have been purchased by the United States and supplied to Syrian groups. In one instance, PG-9 73mm rockets, sold by Romanian arms manufacturers to the U.S. Army in 2013 and 2014, were found sprinkled across both battlefields. Containers with matching lot numbers were found in eastern Syria and recovered from an ISIS convoy in Fallujah, the report says. The rockets, adapted by the group to use in their launchers, gave fighters a potent weapon against U.S.-supplied tanks and armored Humvees.
Records obtained by CAR from Romanian officials include agreements indicating the United States would not re-export those and other weapons, part of an effort to curb weapons trafficking. Saudi Arabia was another source of unauthorized weapons transfers to Syria, the report says. CAR’s report says the U.S. government did not respond to requests to trace this and other weapons documented by its researchers.
• It took only weeks for ISIS to get its hands on U.S. antitank missiles.