25 May, 2017
The audit reveals that the DoD "did not have accurate, up-to-date records on the quantity and location" of a vast amount of equipment on hand in Kuwait and Iraq.
The fund was created in fiscal year 2015, and Congress initially appropriated $1.6 billion for it.
"Sending millions of dollars' worth of arms into a black hole and hoping for the best is not a viable counter-terrorism strategy", Amnesty researcher Patrick Wilcken said in a release Wednesday.
Commanders also assumed that equipment transferred into Iraq had made it to the Iraqi government, when it is possible it did not, the Defense Department Inspector General's office said. A 2015 Amnesty International report found that a large percentage of ISIS's stockpile is composed of "weapons and equipment looted, captured or illicitly traded from poorly secured Iraqi military stocks".
Tens of thousands of assault rifles, hundreds of humvees and a whole slew of other stuff was sent to Iraq with no central database to keep track of it, and the military relying on haphazard, handwritten receipts, leaving open the possibility that much of the equipment just got illegally diverted and no one ever noticed.
The audit also claimed that the Department of Defense did not have responsibility for tracking transfers immediately after delivery to the Iraqi authorities, despite the fact that the department's Golden Sentry programme is mandated to carry out post-delivery checks. In some cases, the Iraqi army was unaware of what was stored in its own warehouses, and some military equipment-which had never been inventoried-was stored out in the open in shipping containers.
"It makes for especially sobering reading given the long history of leakage of US arms to multiple armed groups committing atrocities in Iraq", including Daesh terror group, Wilcken said.
"The need for post-delivery checks is vital", said Wilcken.
Mr Wilcken warned that "any fragilities" along the arms transfer chain greatly increase the risk of weapons falling into the hands of armed groups who have "wrought havoc and caused huge human suffering" in the region.
"After all this time and all these warnings, the same problems keep re-occurring".
The consistently lax controls within the Iraqi chain of command in documenting DoD deliveries and record keeping poses the risk of having arms ending up in the hands of terror organizations such as ISIS as well as paramilitary militias who have no rights to the equipment.
Amnesty said it makes it easier for equipment to go missing and end up in the hands of groups accused of human rights violations and hostile to the United States, like IS or Iranian-backed Shia paramilitary forces. Additionally, the audit claimed that under the Iraqi Train and Equip Fund, once the equipment was transferred to the government of Iraq, the Pentagon no longer had to monitor the material as it was no longer USA government property.
The organization asked the countries that sell arms to Iraq to ensure that all necessary measures are taken for the weapons not to fall into the wrong hands.
