US weapons sent to Kurds fell into the hands of terrorists, confesses Pentagon
The Pentagon admitted that a portion of its cache of weapons meant for Kurdish forces battling Islamic State militants in Kobani has fallen into the hands of the militants, a concern that Turkish leaders says is frustrating.
Government officials from U.S. Depoartment of Defense contradicted their earlier claims that American weapons “always” reach its intended destinations and confessed that at least two bundles (out of a minimum of 28 drops) are now in the hands of terrorists.
Screenshot from YouTube video of Islamic State militants “thanking” Washington for their “new” weapons
“Yesterday we announced that one resupply bundle went astray and was destroyed. We have since relooked at that and we have determined that a second bundle also went astray and probably fell into enemy hands,” Pentagon spokesman Army Colonel Steve Warren said.
One of the bundles was later destroyed in an airstrike. Warren was unclear how Washington verified the destruction.
White House, when Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes insisted to CNN that the administration feels “very confident that, when we air drop support as we did into Kobani… we’ve been able to hit the target in terms of reaching the people we want to reach.”
This comes as the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) posted a video showing off their brand-new American hardware in boxes with English writing and a parachute displayed in the clip. The men in the video “thanked” Washington for the cache of weapons.
The Russian Times reports that: “…the current failure to deliver lethal equipment into the right hands is not an isolated incident – merely the latest in a series of gains by IS terrorists rampaging through northern Syria and Iraq, where millions of dollars in American equipment had already been collected from abandoned military bases…It has in some circles become common sense that the threat posed by the IS has been greatly facilitated by America, whose weapons manufacturers are now reaping the benefits of the destruction caused by the terrorists by advocating for more weapons exports.”
“In terms of the companies’ interests, profit and revenue, surely war facilitates that if you’re a defense industry. The irony is that the US and the larger coalition is using these weapons oftentimes against Islamic State, which has been armed inadvertently by the US and these Sunni-coalition countries. Because we provided arms in the context of the Arab awakening to support the uprising against [Alawite (Shiite) Syrian President] Assad. And Islamic State ended up prying these weapons away from the so-called ‘moderate Syrian rebels’, as well as by scaring the Iraqi federal forces into submission. And the US had been arming to the teeth the Iraqi government,” Max Abrahms, an expert on terrorism at Northeastern University, told RT.
