US military aid to its client regimes goes unaccounted for — and often finds its way to terrorist groups, says a former UN weapons inspector.
Video emerged this week of a Hamas guerrilla thanking the US for the rifle he carried in the groups incursion into Israel, saying it came from a shipment of weapons to Ukraine that had found its way onto the black market.
Scott Ritter told Sputnik that Washington is lackadaisical when it comes to keeping track of arms it gifts to its foreign proxies.
"We've seen the weapons some of the Hamas assault squads are making use of American-made M4 rifles," Ritter noted. "So it's not a question of whether or not they have them. We know they have them. The question is, where did they get them from?"
"Historically we tend to flood a client state with weapons as part of our security agreement," Ritter said. "The American calculation is never about the quality of the assistance being provided, but the quantity, because the quantification is linked to a dollar figure that the US Congress has established."
"That dollar figure needs to be translated into a deliverable that could be reported back to Congress, saying that we have provided this much money for this and that. And so weapons is the easiest thing we will send in," he added.
He recalled how during the Western occupation of Iraq, advisers to the new police force asked for rifles and handguns from the US — which corrupt officers then sold on the black market. The firearms ultimately ended up in the hands of Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK)* militants in neighboring Turkiye, where they were captured by police and traced back to the US.
"We do that everywhere we go. We just give the weapons away and we walk away," Ritter said.
Washington's failure to keep track of its arms handouts to the Kiev regime is also being felt acutely in West Africa.
"We see the same thing in Africa, where weaponry that we provided to Ukraine, in particular handheld anti-tank missiles, are showing up in the Lake Chad region in the hands of Boko Haram, the Islamist terrorist group that's using them against Niger forces, the forces from Chad, forces from Nigeria, forces from Cameroon, many of these forces whom we train," Ritter said. "Our weapons that we send to Ukraine get in the hands of the people that are fighting the forces that are ostensibly friendly to us. So this is a big problem."
The former US Marine said government officials seemed unconcerned where the billions of dollars' worth of military aid ends up.
"There's literally no accounting for these weapons," Ritter warned. "There's no quality control in terms of being able to tell Congress or tell anybody, American policymakers, what the status of these weapons is."
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*a militant group Turkish authorities consider terrorists