Amnesty International: Did $1 Billion Worth of Lost U.S. Weapons End Up in the Hands of ISIS?

A newly declassified Pentagon audit shows the U.S. Army failed to keep track of more than $1 billion worth of weapons and military equipment sent to Iraq and Kuwait, including tens of thousands of assault rifles and hundreds of armored vehicles. The audit found improper record-keeping, including duplicated spreadsheets, handwritten receipts and a lack of a central database to track the transfers. Some of the weapons have been tracked down In Iraq, says our guest Patrick Wilcken, Amnesty International’s arms control and human rights researcher. "It’s very difficult to actually track individual weapons, but we have been looking at a lot of images and films of Islamic State deploying weapons and also the Shia militias that are now grouped under the Popular Mobilization Units," Wilcken says. "We have looked at what type of weapons that they are deploying, and they’re deploying weapons from all over the world, including fairly recently produced U.S. weapons."