Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Thousands of guns unaccounted for by Afghan security forces --- Information on nearly three-quarters of a million guns purchased by the US for the Afghan National Security Forces is either missing or duplicated, an audit of SIGAR inspectors revealed, sparking fears they could have ended up in Taliban hands. -- Both the US and Afghan authorities have failed to keep track of 747,000 weapons purchased for the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), the latest report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) reported on Monday. -- Now the US watchdog is expressing fear that at least some of these weapons could find their way into the hands of Taliban insurgents, to be used to kill ISAF and Afghan troops. -- "Without confidence in the Afghan government’s ability to account for or properly dispose of these weapons, SIGAR is concerned that they could be obtained by insurgents and pose additional risks to Afghan civilians and the ANSF," said the report released on Monday. -- The US Department of Defense’s OVERLORD database for Afghanistan has nearly half a million weapons registered, yet over 40 percent of the entries are either duplicated or simply missing. --- Another database called SCIP, the inventory for the 700,000 weapons and auxiliary equipment (worth about $626 million) handed over by the US DoD to Afghan security forces since 2004, has also been found to be inconsistent by SIGAR investigators, who claim that tens of thousands of weapons are now unaccounted for because the data from the Department of Defense “is not very reliable.” -- In 2009 a quarter of a million weapons were sent to Afghan security forces. Of these, the serial numbers of 46,000 guns were unregistered, making all of them virtually untraceable, the General Accounting office said. -- “Accountability over these weapons within DOD prior to their transfer to Afghan ownership is affected by incompatible inventory systems that have missing serial numbers, inaccurate shipping and receiving dates, and duplicate records, that may result in missing weapons prior to transfer to the ANSF,” SIGAR auditors concluded. -- “However, the problems are far more severe after the weapons are transferred to the ANSF. ANSF record-keeping and inventory processes are poor and, in many cases, we were unable to conduct even basic inventory testing at the ANSF facilities we visited,” the report said. - More, http://rt.com/news/176004-afghanistan-missing-weapons-sigar/

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