Time for the Administration to directly arm and fund the Kurds. Update to this previous story.
With the victory last week over Islamic State forces at Kobani, Syria, one might think that the United States and Iraqi governments would be looking to increase shipments of armaments to the Kurdish forces who did the actual fighting.
But according to the Kurd overseeing much of the ground campaign in Kobani, his peshmerga units are facing a shortage of ammunition and guns just at the moment they have turned the tide against the jihadis.
In an exclusive interview from a command center on the Iraq-Syria border, Masrour Barzani, the chancellor of the Kurdistan Region Security Council, told me his forces have received only four shipments of needed munitions in recent months. “The shortage of ammunition is a big problem and this is not even close to what we were asking for,” he said.
His comments have all the more significance because a recent deal — brokered in part by the U.S. — commits the Baghdad government to provide $1 billion to Kurdish forces in exchange for the Kurds sharing revenue of their oil exports. Barzani says that so far, his forces have not received that money, though he spoke to me before the final deal was passed last week in Iraq’s parliament as part of its annual budget. […]
The United States spent 10 years training an Iraqi army, it spent billions of dollars training an Iraqi army and equipping it with Humvees, MRAPs [mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles], artillery and howitzers, all of this given to the Iraqi army, and it was dismantled in 10 hours,” Barzani said, referring to the collapse of the Iraqi forces in June at Mosul and around Kirkuk.
A State Department official in Washington contacted on Thursday largely disputed the characterization that the Kurds were being deprived. In talking points provided to me, the official pointed out that Baghdad had recently sent 25 MRAPs to the Kurds, and that since August there have been 59 international cargo flights worth of ammunition delivered to the peshmerga. This included 45,000 mortar rounds, 2,800 rocket-propelled-grenade launchers, 40,000 rounds for those launchers, and 18,000 assault rifles.
Yet Barzani said that most of those shipments came in the late summer and fall from eastern European countries, and that the resupply of the Kurdish forces since December has slowed to a trickle. He was particularly angry that his forces received only 25 MRAPs.