Audit: Army failed to properly track arms going to Iraqi government

The Army failed to properly track more than $1 billion worth of military vehicles, ammunition and other equipment meant to go to the government of Iraq, according to a 2016 audit obtained and released by Amnesty International on Wednesday.

The Army’s 1st Theater Sustainment Command  (1st TSC) “did not have accurate, up-to-date records on the quantity and location of [Iraq Train and Equip Fund] equipment on hand in Kuwait and Iraq,” the Pentagon’s inspector general wrote in the audit report.

The report, which had been marked “for official use only” and was not released publicly at the time, was obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.

{mosads}“This audit provides a worrying insight into the U.S. Army’s flawed — and potentially dangerous — system for controlling millions of dollars’ worth of arms transfers to a hugely volatile region,” Patrick Wilcken, Amnesty’s arms control and human rights researcher, said in a statement.

 “It makes for especially sobering reading given the long history of leakage of U.S. arms to multiple armed groups committing atrocities in Iraq, including the armed group calling itself the Islamic State.”

The Iraq Train and Equip Fund was created by Congress in 2015 to help Iraq in the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Congress appropriated $1.6 billion to the fund that year. In 2016, it appropriated $715 million.

The audit specifically faulted the 1st TSC for not having a centralized system to track the equipment as it was being transferred to the Iraqi government. Instead, it used multiple, manually written spreadsheets, according to the audit.

The inspector general recommended the 1st TSC use an automated system, and commanders in the report said they were rectifying the situation.

“The deputy commander, 1st TSC, agreed with our findings and immediately initiated steps to implement corrective actions,” the audit said. “For a short-term solution, the 1st TSC developed a centralized equipment visibility tracker.”

Commanders were also working toward an automated system as a long-term solution, according to the audit.

Amnesty remained skeptical, however, highlighting that the Pentagon made similar comments in a 2007 Government Accountability Office report on similar problems with tracking equipment given to Iraqi forces.

“After all this time and all these warnings, the same problems keep re-occurring,” Wilcken said. “This should be an urgent wake-up call for the U.S., and all countries supplying arms to Iraq, to urgently shore up checks and controls. Sending millions of dollars’ worth of arms into a black hole and hoping for the best is not a viable counter-terrorism strategy; it is just reckless.”

Amnesty sent Pentagon officials a letter in September 2016 asking what controls were in place to make sure weapons are not given to militias, among other concerns, but has never heard back, Wilcken added in an email.

“We also did speak to officials on the Iraq desk at the Dept. of State in January and put similar questions to them, but they ducked them saying that this was not their area of expertise,” he added.