Expert: ISIS receiving weapons directly from Eastern Europe via Saudi Arabia, Turkey

James Bevan, the director of Conflict Armament Research (CAR), told The Huffington Post UK that investigations have discovered weapons manufactured in Eastern Europe are being delivered to ISIS "almost direct" to Syria and Iraq.

ISIS had mostly been using weapons captured from the Iraqi and Syrian armies.

"Islamic State then overran Iraqi army positions, took those weapons and moved them into Syria." ISIS arms could also have come from Syrian armed forces who the group had beaten in battles, he explained. "This is normal with any kind of rebellion or insurgency, they first use the weapons and ammunition of their adversaries."

Bevan claims that newer arms "from 2013 to 2014 and even 2015 dates of manufacture," have been found in ISIS possession.

He then went onto claim that Saudi Arabia buys the weapons then sends them "straight to Turkey", from where ISIS receive the weapons "very, very rapidly."

"We have a supply chain which goes from an Eastern European manufacturer, to a second Eastern European country, to Saudi Arabia, to Turkey, to a Syrian opposition group and then to Islamic State in Falluja in Iraq, in less than two months," he said. "That's almost direct. If you want to put something on a boat and float it, it's going to take a month."

He then claimed that some states are supporting "pretty hard line Islamist forces," adding that: "it's very difficult to distinguish between them and Islamic State. They are subsumed within Islamic State, or have a deal with them, or the group will fracture and its fighters will leave with their weapons and join Islamic State."

"It means that anyone supplying Syrian opposition groups has absolutely no control over the ultimate destination of those weapons. It's almost a mirror image of what happened in Afghanistan in the 1980s, in the sense that the US, Saudi Arabia and allied states were supplying weapons to the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence Agency.

"They then had discretion as to who to give them to. They picked the winners, which were the hard line Islamist forces that were the origins for Al Qaeda and the Taliban."

He then went onto state their interactions with Eastern Europe.

"What we are doing is to go back to those [Eastern European] governments and saying actually, you've got a really significant problem because you exported 7,000 rockets to Saudi Arabia which are all Soviet calibres, and you know full well that Saudi Arabia doesn't use that stuff, so why did you export that to them because they are obviously giving it to someone else?

"A lot of the time they do know and they just don't care," he admitted.

"A number of these things were being manufactured in Europe and going onto the Turkish domestic market totally unregulated, and then Islamic state was basically using Turkey as basically a warehouse," Bevan said.

Source: Expert: ISIS receiving weapons directly from Eastern Europe via Saudi Arabia, Turkey