republican war, what a mess

American military lost track of some 190,000 pistols and automatic rifles supplied by the United States to Iraq’s security forces in 2004 and 2005, as auditors discovered in the past year. Billions of dollars in arms disappeared without significant oversight.

American officers short-circuited the chain of custody by rushing to Baghdad’s airport to claim crates of newly arrived weapons without filing the necessary paperwork. And Iraqis regularly sold or stole the American-supplied weapons, American officers and contractors said.

Iraqi security guards are suspected of stealing hundreds of weapons last year in about 10 major thefts at arms depots at Taji and Abu Ghraib. Already there is evidence that some American-supplied weapons fell into the hands of guerrillas responsible for attacks against Turkey, an important United States ally.

Many of those weapons were issued when Gen. David H. Petraeus, now the top American commander in Iraq, was responsible for training and equipping Iraqi security forces in 2004 and 2005. He said that warehouse crews had been infiltrated by Iraqis sympathetic to insurgents, and that sometimes weapons would disappear.

30 percent of the equipment delivered went to Iraqi soldiers who showed up for duty one day, and disappeared the next. the Pentagon turned to contractors to operate warehouses to store equipment and weapons.

The Baghdad Police Academy, which along with a nearby warehouse, was operated by an American-owned Contractor company based in Kuwait.