Iran-Backed Militias Getting Weapons Meant for Iraqi Army

This is what happens when you cut and run and leave weapons in the hands of a (former) enemy you should have completely destroyed in the first place.

From News Max.

U.S. weapons intended for Iraq’s embattled military are winding up in the hands of Shiite militias backed by Iran, Bloomberg reports.

Obama administration officials and U.S. lawmakers say the Baghdad government, which received $1.2 billion in training and equipment assistance in the omnibus spending bill passed by Congress last month, has been turning military hardware over to the militias.

A senior administration official told Bloomberg’s Josh Rogin and Eli Lake that the U.S. government is aware of this but is caught in a dilemma. Iraqi security forces are unable to fight ISIS without the assistance of the militias, who are sometimes commanded by officers of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps.

But if Washington were to stop arming the Iraqi military, the situation would get even worse, with ISIS overrunning even more of Iraq and committing atrocities on an even larger scale. The official said the risk of failing to help the Baghdad government was greater than the risk of doing so.

The official said that although the new Iraqi government under Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi has been more responsive to U.S. concerns over transferring weapons than the previous government headed by Nouri al-Maliki, it has not been vigilant enough.

Evidence of that can be seen on Facebook, where members of Iraqi Shiite militias proudly display American arms, such as this photo from October of an M1A1 Abrams tank draped in a Hezbollah flag…..

Speaking on the record, White House and Pentagon officials deny there is any problem with regard to Baghdad’s transferring weapons.