The lost weapons could be fueling the black market, reports The New York Times (NYT).
With a string of Freedom of Information Act [FOIA] requests that began last year, he [Overton] and his small team of researchers pooled 14 years’ worth of Pentagon contract information related to rifles, pistols, machine guns and their associated attachments and ammunition, both for American troops and for their partners and proxies. They then crosschecked the data against other public records.
Today the Pentagon has only a partial idea of how many weapons it issued, much less where these weapons are. Meanwhile, the effectively bottomless abundance of black-market weapons from American sources is one reason Iraq will not recover from its post-invasion woes anytime soon.
The charity’s research covered U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) data from September 11, 2001, thru September 10, 2015.
AOAV found that of an estimated 1.45 million guns the U.S. government gave to Iraq and Afghanistan over that period, the Pentagon could only account for 700,000 (48 percent).
The 1.45 million small arms included more than 978,000 assault rifles, 266,000 pistols, and almost 112,000 machine guns.