According to Almasalah news, the head of the Badr Parliamentary bloc shared this information with parliament on Thursday, claiming that the group is in possession of evidence pointing to US military provisions to Islamic State and further stating that they will be able to share the documented evidence at a later time.
The Badr Organization is an offshoot of the Badr Brigades, the military wing of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), which was formed during the 1982 Iran-Iraq war and consisted primarily of Iraqi exiles and refugees in Iran. Since the 2003 American-led invasion, the group changed their name from “Brigade” to “Organization,” and have subsequently become an official Iraqi political party. The group maintains a military wing and has risen to prominence in the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq, most notably for its role in the liberation of the Diyala Province in February.
Al-Araji’s claims of US military support to Islamic State are not the first of their kind, nor are they the first coming from this particular group. In January, Hadi Al-Ameri, the Secretary General of Badr, reported to Press TV that a US aircraft had air dropped weapons in the Islamic State-controlled Salahuddin Province in Iraq.
According to Press TV, a study conducted by a London-based group has also found that Islamic State militants had been using “significant quantities” of arms marked “property of the US government.”
The weapons were believed to have been transferred to the Islamic State from other rebel groups in Syria, sometimes dubbed as “moderate” by the US government. US Senator Rand Paul had also previously remarked on the possibility of weapons transfer to Islamic State terrorists, stating that “one of the reasons why ISIS has been emboldened is because we have been arming their allies.”
As Badr has not yet revealed the documents, it is unclear whether the new evidence would reveal similar instances of US inadvertent support of Islamic State.
