by Frank James
General David Petraeus, the U.S. commander whose September Iraq progress report is being anxiously awaited here in Washington, is generally accorded high marks for his ideas on counterinsurgency, his leadership skills and his brains.
But it’s starting to look like even a general of Petraeus’s highly regarded abilities can be caught up by unintended consequences in a place as unruly as Iraq.
Several years ago, when Petraeus was in charge of training and equipping Iraqi security forces, he signed off on a program to speedily supply weapons like automatic rifles and sidearms to Iraqis.
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Over the past year, inquiries by federal oversight agencies have found serious discrepancies in military records of where thousands of weapons intended for Iraqi security forces actually ended up. None of those agencies concluded that weapons found their way to insurgents or militias.
In their public reports, those agencies did not raise the possibility of criminal wrongdoing, and General Petraeus has said that the imperative to provide weapons to Iraqi security forces was more important than maintaining impeccable records.
Today, the Times reported that U.S. officials are acknowledging that some of those weapons have turned up in Turkey where they are have been used in crimes.
WASHINGTON, Aug. 29 — Weapons that were originally given to Iraqi security forces by the American military have been recovered over the past year by the authorities in Turkey after being used in violent crimes in that country, Pentagon officials said Wednesday.
The discovery that serial numbers on pistols and other weapons recovered in Turkey matched those distributed to Iraqi police units has prompted growing concern by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates that controls on weapons being provided to Iraqis are inadequate. It was also a factor in the decision to dispatch the department’s inspector general to Iraq next week to investigate the problem, the officials said.
Pentagon officials said they did not yet have evidence that Iraqi security forces or Kurdish officials were selling or giving the weapons to Kurdish separatists, as Turkish officials have contended.
It was possible, they said, that the weapons had been stolen or lost during firefights and smuggled into Turkey after being sold in Iraq’s extensive black market for firearms. Officials gave widely varied estimates — from dozens to hundreds — of how many American-supplied weapons had been found in Turkey.
At yesterday’s Pentogon press briefing, Defense Department spokesman Geoff Morrell, indicated this problem has Defense Secretary Robert Gate’s full attention. He said:
Since January, the Inspector General’s Office has been thoroughly investigating reports of unaccounted for weapons as well as allegations of arms ending up in the wrong hands. Secretary Gates, who since May has twice received lengthy briefings on the progress of the probe, is deeply troubled by the reports and the allegations. He asked Inspector General Mick Kicklighter to use whatever resources are necessary to ensure we currently have adequate oversight procedures in place. General Kicklighter has informed the secretary that he will remain in-country as long as it takes to find out if record-keeping problems persist, and if so, make recommendations to the commanders on the ground how to fix those problems.
Turkey, of course, an important U.S. ally in the region, was opposed to the U.S. invasion of Iraq from the start since it feared an incursion might embolden Iraq’s Kurdish population, with Kurds in Turkey making common cause with their Iraq kinsmen to establish a Greater Kurdistan that would include part of Turkey.
So U.S. weapons being smuggled from Iraq into Turkey where they are in turn used in crimes, even perhaps by Kurdish separatists, is a very sensitive problem for U.S. officials who will need Turkey’s help to keep the region from the kind of increasing instability that could come from a Turkish invasion of northern Iraq against the Kurds, for example.
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Which is why Gates is taking the matter so seriously.