One Million Weapons to Iraq; Many Go Missing

[G_j]

http://corpwatch.org/article.php?id=15184

One Million Weapons to Iraq; Many Go Missing

by Pratap Chatterjee, Special to CorpWatch
September 22nd, 2008

Clandestine gun suppliers, funded by the U.S. and Iraqi governments, have flooded Iraq with a million weapons since 2003, charges a new Amnesty International investigation. Because of faulty or non-existent government tracking systems, many of those guns have gone missing, and some have turned up in the hands of insurgents.

Contracts with one of these companies, Taos Industries, account for almost half of the $217 million Baghdad and Washington have officially spent to arm the Iraqi army, police and security forces employed by various Iraqi ministries.

Taos was founded in 1989 by a former U.S. intelligence official in Madison, Alabama, to traffic Soviet weapons systems after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In October 2006 Taos was sold to a company controlled by the Sultans, a powerful Kuwaiti family that also controls billions of dollars worth of contracts for food supply and heavy equipment deliveries to U.S. bases throughout Iraq.

Global Arms Trafficking

Amnesty’s new report, "Blood at the Crossroads: Making the Case for a Global Arms Trade Treaty," shines a light on the catastrophic human rights consequences of the kind of unrestrained arms trading that forms much of Taos’s business. The reports draws lessons from nine case studies including the conflict in Darfur, military crackdowns in Burma and Guinea, and sectarian violence in Iraq, to make recommendation on how to prevent human rights abuses when governments sell or transfer conventional arms to other countries. (See box.)

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