US Loses Hundreds of Thousands of Guns in Iraq, Afghanistan: Report
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – The Pentagon has somehow misplaced hundreds of thousands out of 1.45 million guns that were shipped to Iraq and Afghanistan since the start of the “war on terror,” according to a newly-released report.
An investigation by the organization, Action on Armed Violence, AOAV, on data from the US Department of Defense showed that Pentagon was keeping poor records and there was a discrepancy in gun numbers.
Looking at the publicly available data, AOAV, estimated that the US Department of Defense sent over 1.4 million small arms - including pistols, rifles and machine guns to Iraq and Afghanistan, but government records can only account for around 700,000 of them, only 48 percent of what was sent, TeleSUR news website reported on Saturday.
The US Department of Defense reported 484,680 small arms sent to Afghanistan, but the AOAV found over 503,328. In Iraq, the US Department of Defense reported 206, 446 small arms while the AOAV found over 740,000.
Including small arms and grenade launchers, 210,153 weapons were sent to Iraq and 509,321 to Afghanistan. The AOAV recorded 190,000 Ak-47 assault rifles in 2007, none of which were accounted for by the Department of Defense.
“This failure shows the lack of accountability, transparency and joined up data that exists at the very heart of the US government’s weapon procurement and distribution systems,” said the AOAV on its website.
The Government Accountability Office, GAO, stated in a 2007 report that the Department of Defense could not ensure that all arms sent to Iraq actually went to Security forces as they were intended.
Between 9/11 and Sep. 2015, the US Department of Defense issued arms contracts worth over $US 40 billion in total, AOAV said in an August report.
In February the Pentagon set out its US$582.7 billion defense budget, with $145.8 million earmarked in support for Israel, a US$2.4 billion increase from last year's base budget. A June audit from the US Department of Defense Inspector General revealed that trillions of dollars of the US army were moved around and “materially misstated,” to make it appear that the army's accounts balanced out. In 2015 alone US$6.5 trillion was moved around in wrongful accounting entries.
