American-made weapons are the backbone of ISIS operations.
Source: ISIS Showcases Massive Arsenal of American-Made Weapons in New Video
Category: Weapons
Isis has enough weapons to carry on fighting for two years, UN warns
- Arsenal is sufficient enough to threaten region ‘even without territory’
- Much of Isis’s weapon stocks were stolen from US-backed Iraqi military
- Report recommends sanctions including seizing Isis oil tanker trucks
- Foreign jihadis flocking to Iraq and Syria on ‘unprecedented scale’
A new report prepared for the United Nations Security Council warns that the militant group known as the Islamic State (Isis) possesses sufficient reserves of small arms, ammunition and vehicles to wage its war for Syria and Iraq for up to two years.
The size and breadth of the Isis arsenal provides the group with durable mobility, range and a limited defense against low-flying aircraft. Even if the US-led bombing campaign continues to destroy the group’s vehicles and heavier weapons, the UN report states, it “cannot mitigate the effect of the significant volume of light weapons” Isis possesses.
Those weapons “are sufficient to allow [Isis] to continue fighting at current levels for six months to two years”, the UN report finds, making Isis not only the world’s best-funded terrorist group but among its best armed.
Isis, along with its former rival turned occasional tactical ally the Nusra Front, are sufficiently armed to threaten the region “even without territory”, the report concludes.
The report, months in the making, recommends the UN implement new steps to cut off Isis’s access to money and guns.
The Isis arsenal, according to the UN assessment, includes T-55 and T-72 tanks; US-manufactured Humvees; machine guns; short-range anti-aircraft artillery, including shoulder-mounted rockets captured from Iraqi and Syrian military stocks; and “extensive supplies of ammunition”. One member state, not named in the report, contends that Isis maintains a motor pool of 250 captured vehicles.
Much of the Isis weapons stocks, particularly “state of the art” weaponry stolen from the US-backed Iraqi military, was “unused” before Isis seized it, the report finds. But some of the relatively complex weapons “may be too much of a challenge” for Isis to effectively wield or maintain.
Earlier this year, speculation focussed on Isis’s potential ability to produce chemical weapons after it seized Iraqi facilities that had contributed to Saddam Hussein’s illicit weapons programs, but the UN report casts doubt on the likelihood that Isis possesses the “capability to fully exploit material it might have seized”. Nor does the UN report believe that Isis can manufacture its own chemical or other weapons of mass destruction.
But at least one anonymous member state has provided information about “chemicals and poison-coated metal balls” placed inside Isis’s homemade bombs to maximize damage. In October, Kurdish forces defending the Syrian town of Kobani from Isis reported cases of skin blistering, burning eyes and difficulty breathing after the detonation of an Isis bomb.
The UN Security Council is expected to take up consideration of the report on Wednesday.
The report recommends the UN adopt new waves of sanctions designed to disrupt the well-financed Isis’s economic health. Significant among them is a call for states bordering Isis-controlled territory to “promptly seize all oil tanker trucks and their loads” coming in or going out.
While the report warns that Isis has alternate revenue sources, and does not predict that truck seizures can eliminate Isis’s oil smuggling money, it holds out hope that raising the costs to smuggling networks and trucking companies will deter them from bringing Isis oil to market.
To combat Isis’s ability to resupply its weapons stocks and launder money, the report recommends the UN mandate that no aircraft originating from Isis-held territory can land on airstrips in member states, and to prohibit flights into Isis-held territory. Exemptions would be made for humanitarian relief planes.
The report comes on the heels of an October report to the Security Council assessing that 15,000 fighters from 80 countries have flooded into Syria and Iraq to fight alongside Isis and other militant groups.
While still months off, the US has indicated it will intensify its fight against Isis, primarily in Iraq. After doubling the US troop commitment there, defense officials have said the US will bolster 12 Iraqi and Kurdish brigades, and may even join in the Iraqi fighting for key terrain, such as the borderlands between Syria and Iraq or the city of Mosul.
Tribe leader Sheikh Naeem al-Ga’oud says he was not provided with any arms by the central government and army. Aren’t we supplying weapons anymore?
Islamic State militants have killed 322 members of an Iraqi tribe in western Anbar province, including dozens of women and children whose bodies were dumped in a well, the government said in the first official confirmation of the scale of the massacre.
The systematic killings, which one tribal leader said were continuing on Sunday, marked some of the worst bloodshed in Iraq since the Sunni militants swept through the north in June with the aim of establishing medieval caliphate there and in Syria.
The Albu Nimr, also Sunni, had put up fierce resistance against Islamic State for weeks but finally ran low on ammunition, food and fuel last week as Islamic State fighters closed in on their village Zauiyat Albu Nimr.
“The number of people killed by Islamic State from Albu Nimr tribe is 322. The bodies of 50 women and children have also been discovered dumped in a well,” the country’s Human Rights Ministry said on Sunday.
One of the leaders of the tribe, Sheikh Naeem al-Ga’oud, told Reuters that he had repeatedly asked the central government and army to provide his men with arms but no action was taken.
State television said on Sunday that prime minister Haider al-Abadi had ordered air strikes on Islamic State targets around the town of Hit in response to the killings.
Officials at a government security operations command centre in Anbar and civilians reached by Reuters said they had not heard of or witnessed air strikes.
The fall of the village dampened the Shia-led national government’s hopes the Sunni tribesmen of Anbar – who once helped US Marines defeat al-Qaida – would become a formidable force again and help the army take on Iraq’s new, far more effective enemy.
US air strikes have helped Kurdish peshmerga fighters retake territory in the north that Islamic State had captured in its drive for an Islamic empire that redraws the map of the Middle East. But the picture in Anbar is more precarious.
Islamic State already controls most of the vast desert province which includes towns in the Euphrates River valley dominated by Sunni tribes, running from the Syrian border to the western outskirts of Baghdad.
If the province falls, it could give Islamic State a better chance to make good on its threat to march on the capital.
Ga’aud said 75 more members of his tribe were killed on Sunday under the same scenario – they were hunted down while trying to escape from Islamic State, shot dead execution-style and dumped near the town of Haditha.
The Albu Nimr leader also said Islamic State killed 15 high school and college students in Zauiyat Albu Nimr and that, apart from an air drop, there had been no help from the US-led air campaign.
Security and government officials could not be immediately reached to confirm the latest killings.
In Anbar, the militants are now encircling a large air base and the vital Haditha dam on the Euphrates. Fighters control towns from the Syrian border to parts of provincial capital Ramadi and into the lush irrigated areas near Baghdad.
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