ISIS Now Has Main Battle Tanks, Howitzers

This is the price of simply abandoning Iraq, after Obama blew up the Status of Forces agreement, along with refusing to do more than the utter minimum to stop the growth of ISIS from the get go

(The Fiscal Times) One of the earliest major setbacks in the war against ISIS came last June when the U.S.-backed Iraqi army was routed by Islamic militants in the northern Iraq city of Mosul. Government forces retreated from the Islamic jihadists’ assault. They left behind a trove of costly military hardware, including U.S.-made armored Humvees, trucks, rockets, machine guns and even a helicopter.

Last weekend, the new Iraqi prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, gave Iraqi state television the first detailed accounting of those lost weapons. Some were old or barely functioning, but others were in good shape and of great value to the ISIS militants.

According to Reuters, the U.S.-made weaponry that fell into enemy hands including 2,300 Humvee armored vehicles, at least 40 M1A1 main battle tanks, 74,000 machine guns, and as many as 52 M198 howitzer mobile gun systems, plus small arms and ammunition.

The grand total comes to $656.4 million, but experts say those losses represent just a portion of the many hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of U.S.-supplied military equipment that has fallen into ISIS’s hands and is being used against the U.S. and allied forces on the ground in Iraq and neighboring Syria.

ISIS has continuously added to that inventory with the fall of other Iraqi cities, as well as all the armaments, mostly of Soviet design, taken from Syria. Heck of a job, Brownie, er, Obama!

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

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