Scandal Of Missing Guns

How could 200,000 AK 47 assault rifles and millions of rounds of ammunition intended for the Iraqi police and military have vanished into thin air? That is a question no one at the Department of Defense Department appears able or willing to answer. The facts are, however, that four planeloads containing the guns and ammo were flown out of a US base in Bosnia on route to Baghdad in August 2004 but Baghdad airport records show they never arrived.
That leaves the awful possibilities the guns could have fallen into the wrong hands, possibly into the clutches of Al Qaeda of one of its affiliates or even into the hands of insurgents in Iraq.
As much as there is a mystery surrounding the whereabouts of the guns, there is also a complex web of intrigue surrounding the way in which the DOD used cut-out companies to handle the weapons, all of which came from stockpiles of guns handed in for destruction after the Bosnian conflict of the 1990s. While there appears to have been nothing illegal in the Pentagon deciding to use such weapons to arm the fledgling Iraqi police and army, there is considerable skepticism about a lack of transparency surrounding the deal and the questionable manner in which the Pentagon turned to private contractors, one whom had a murky past.
What has so far been established is that the four shiploads of weapons and ammunition were scheduled to be delivered to Iraq between July 2004- 2005 and the first major shipload left Bosnian air space in August 2004. Rather than handle the weapons transfer itself, the DOD turned to the UK and US embassies in Bosnia to engage a number of companies that had previously been involved in illegally shipping arms to Saddam Hussein and to all sides during the Balkans conflicts of the 1990s. One of those companies was Aercom which was investigated in 2003 by the UN and condemned for its role in the guns for diamonds trade in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Nevertheless Aercom was hired to fly the AK 47 shipments to Baghdad from the US Eagle air base at Tuzla in northern Bosnia. According to Amnesty International which carried out a lengthy investigation into the affair there is no record of where the guns went after they left Bosnian air space. It seems they simply disappeared with no record of the flights ever reaching their intended destination. Worse still, on the day of the first shipment the Moldovan government stripped Aercom of its license for security and other irregularities.
The Amnesty report on the missing weapons confirms that the Pentagon, through the military attaché in the US embassy in Sarajevo, used two firms connected to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal to oversee the weapons purchases and transport. Those firms – TAOS and CACI - in turn handed out work to other contractors, arms dealers and shippers in the UK, Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia and of course Moldova where the shady airline, Aercom, was based. In Amnesty’s view the use of Aercom violated UN regulations because the company did not have a proper operating license.

When NATO, the EU and Iraqi authorities were asked if they knew anything about the missing arms they replied that they were not informed in advance about a plan to ship Bosnian weapons to Iraq and they now knew there was no documentation to show the arms reached Iraq. According to several British newspapers, two companies involved in the vanishing arms saga said they had documents to show weapons were delivered to Iraq but refused to produce the documents for scrutiny. It was also reported that a lawyer for one arms dealer admitted a shipment of 1,500 AK assault rifles had gone missing and had eventually ended up in the hands of Al Qaeda. For Amnesty, that still does not address what happened to the 90 tons of rifles and ammunition shipped out of Bosnia at an estimated cost to the US taxpayer of approximately $400 million. According to Amnesty, US military officials responsible for training the Iraqi security forces have confirmed they never saw any weapons from Bosnia and that view was echoed by figures in the Iraqi military when were they were recently approached about the mystery.