BAGHDAD (AFP) — They've been searching for months, but the US military has still not got to the bottom of what happened to tens of thousands of small arms handed to Iraqi forces, fearing many are now in the hands of insurgents.
As an example, the Americans delivered 125,163 Austrian-made Glock semi-automatic pistols to Iraqi police between 2003 and late 2006, Pentagon figures shows.
But in October 2006, senior US official Stuart Bowen compared deliveries carried out by a private American subcontractor and Iraqi stocks and discovered that 13,180 Glocks had vanished.
Nine months later, a US Congressional body established that the American military had lost trace of some 190,000 weapons delivered in 2004 and 2005. That figure included 80,000 pistols -- mostly Glocks.
The Americans handed Iraq's fledgling security forces, lauded as one of the key elements of Iraq's reconstruction, some 370,000 rifles and handguns between 2003 and 2006.
According to Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, less than three percent of the serial numbers of those weapons can still be accounted for.
"The Americans gave us Glocks without registering the serial number and without receipts," a former policeman called Yasser told AFP. He left his unit at the end of 2004 and sold his Glock to "a friend" for 800 dollars.
Indeed, thousands of police who have resigned from the force may have had a handsome automatic pay-off if they sold their weapons.
Since the start of the US programme to train the Iraqi police and army, entire units have been disbanded, disappearing into the ether with all their weapons.
As a result, says a young man who converted his police training into becoming a private security guard, the black market is awash with Glocks that can be snapped up for less than 1,000 dollars.
The abundance of the easy-to-use and robust pistols is not just good news for the armed gangs that infest Baghdad but also for the various militias fighting American soldiers.
Some have even been found in Turkey in the hands of rebels of the separatist Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK).
Colonel Daniel Williams told AFP that a Pentagon inspector, retired general Claude Kicklighter, visited Iraq last month to look into the embarrassing disappearances.
"I do suppose that it is possible for weapons that we provided to the Iraq Security Forces may have ended up in the wrong hands," Williams admitted.
In Fallujah, for a long time the heart of a Sunni rebellion that was retaken by American forces in 2004, "the Glock became the official weapon of the Islamic Army in Iraq," a Sunni insurgent group, Yasser said.
A total of 295,000 policemen have been trained by the American army, 20 percent of whom have now left the security services or who have been killed, Williams said, unwilling to speculate what may have happened to their weapons.
Of greater concern for the US military is the possibility that some of the weaponry intended for the Iraqi security forces could have ended up in insurgents' hands with the complicity of the Iraqi interior ministry.
The ministry was described by the Congressional investigators as having been "co-opted by organised criminals ... to commit crimes such as kidnapping, extortion, bribery." Questioned on the matter by AFP, the ministry offered no comment.
"It is possible that some (interior ministry) leaders may be involved in illegal activities of some kind but I also believe that they are gambling against the odds of not getting caught, arrested, tried, and convicted," said Williams.
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