ISIS fighters parade in a commandeered American Humvee taken from Iraqi security forces down a main road at the northern city of Mosul, Iraq (AP Photo)
MINNEAPOLIS — Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi reported Sunday that 2,300 American Humvees were captured by the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Just a day later, media reports emerged that some of those very armored vehicles had been used in a suicide bombing.
According to Agence France-Presse, al-Abadi admitted the loss in an interview on state TV. “In the collapse of Mosul, we lost a lot of weapons,” he said. “We lost 2,300 Humvees in Mosul alone.”
The Humvees were lost when ISIS forces overran Mosul last year, forcing Iraqi soldiers to abandon tons of equipment during their retreat from the city. Angelo Young, writing for International Business Times, calculated the cost of the lost Humvees at $1 billion.
“The theft of a fleet of American-made military vehicles underscores the difficulty of ensuring that U.S. military aid doesn’t wind up in the hands of the enemy it’s aimed at defeating,” Young wrote on Monday.
On Monday, the day after al-Abadi admitted to the massive loss of Humvees, ISIS used some of those Humvees to kill Iraqi security forces. According to a CNN report, two Humvees were used to block the entrance to a Iraqi security forces base near Samarra, before a tank loaded with explosives detonated inside the compound, killing at least 34 and wounding dozens. Later reports increased the death toll to at least 42.
Despite the repeated losses of U.S. equipment to ISIS forces, the United States continues to supply Iraq with more weapons and vehicles. According to the AFP wire story, “Last year, the US State Department approved a possible sale to Iraq of 1,000 Humvees with increased armour, machine-guns, grenade launchers, other gear and support, which was estimated to cost $579 million.”
Islamic State group militants hold up their flag as they patrol in a commandeered American Humvee in Fallujah, 40 miles (65 kilometers) west of Baghdad, Iraq. (AP Photo)
Independent journalist Ben Swann predicted the effect of these losses in his “Truth In Media: Origin Of ISIS” report in February.
“One of the most important facts that mainstream media ignores time and time again is that ISIS was able to grow so fast, because of all the U.S. military equipment they were able to seize – equipment that our military left in Iraq,” Swann says in the report. “Truckloads of Humvees, tanks and weaponry that instead of taking or destroying, the U.S. government simply decided to leave behind.”
These losses bolster the argument, made by Swann and others, that the U.S. is either knowingly aiding the rise of ISIS, or at least assisting its rise to power through incompetence and neglect.
A U.S. document, released through a Freedom of Information Act request in May, revealed how American intelligence predicted the rise of ISIS and the fall of Mosul. Writing about the document for MyMPN, MintPress News’ blog, Steve Chovanec, an independent geopolitical analyst, argued that the U.S. must be blamed regardless of how active a role it took in creating the so-called “Islamic State:”
“Given that the fall of Mosul and Ramadi too were ‘natural and foreseeable consequences,’ given as well the severely questionable ways in which each city fell and the fact that although these outcomes were predictable, the US-coalition still continued the policies that were known to lead to them, the US and her allies must therefore be taken to have intended these outcomes as well, either directly or indirectly.
Watch Ben Swann’s video, “Origins of ISIS,” below: