NATO weapons that were given to Ukraine were used to kill Israelis by Hamas in the assaults carried out on military and civilian sites in southern Israel.
An AK-47 assault rifle has long been thought of as the go-to weapon for terrorists (or, depending on your point of view, freedom fighters). Today, in the wake of the so-called “global war on terror,” it’s usual to see such combatants brandishing a Glock 9mm pistol or a Colt M4 rifle.
These are taxpayer-funded weapons that were purportedly given to groups working together to fight terrorism and/or freedom fighters (again, depending on the observer’s political opinions), but they really end up in the hands of the latter group. Obviously, Washington never intended for that to happen. However, these weapons somehow end up strengthening the exact forces that the US and its allies are attempting to thwart.
The most recent instance of this phenomenon appears to include Hamas and the assaults carried out on military and civilian sites in southern Israel by terrorists connected to that group. The veracity of a film that purports to show a Hamas warrior thanking Ukraine for supplying small guns, ammunition, and hand grenades has not yet been established. Many US-made weaponry may be seen being used by the Hamas fighters in additional films that were captured during the real battles.
Some US lawmakers are concerned about these videos, including Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia’s 14th District, who Tweeted/Xeeted immediately following the Hamas attack, “We need to work with Israel to track serial numbers on any US weapons used by Hamas against Israel. The congresswoman queries, “Did they come from Afghanistan? “Did they come from Ukraine? Highly likely the answer is both.”
Marjorie Taylor Greene’s inquiries will almost certainly provide information that should cause the US administration great discomfort. Since June of this year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed that anti-tank weaponry developed in the US and meant for Ukraine has begun to show up on the Israeli border. Netanyahu avoided addressing the question of how this had occurred, noting that corruption is pervasive in Ukraine and that Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh has documented hundreds of millions of dollars of aid being diverted to groups for whom it was not originally intended. According to calculations and discussions with numerous reliable sources, it’s possible that up to six out of every ten dollars of help sent to Ukraine was misappropriated. It’s one thing to talk about money, but quite another to talk about guns.
Hamas, an organization that Israel has designated as a terrorist entity, is behind the new Gaza War by launching Operation Al-Aqsa Flood in 2023.
The prevalence of US-made weaponry on the international black market, which terrorists and freedom fighters use to arm themselves, is indicative of the US’s lenient policy toward giving military support to parties engaged in active fighting. The political messaging associated with such deliveries—that the US is actively helping friends in need—appears to be of greater interest to the US. However, the majority of senior US policymakers appear to be unaware of the true security-related components of this operation.
This was made clear in May 2022 when Republican Senator from Kentucky Rand Paul attempted to appoint an inspector general to oversee and account for the $40 billion in military aid to Ukraine that President Joe Biden had requested. A Congress that seemed content to adopt a “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil” stance when it came to the subject of Ukraine and corruption decisively blocked Senator Paul’s motion.
The problem of US weapons getting into the hands of people for whom they weren’t intended as well as -more significantly – of people for whom they were designed to fight and then being used against American allies is nothing new. Back in 2007, Turkish authorities began finding firearms belonging to PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party) fighters who had died in Turkey that had serial numbers connected to weapons transfers from the US to Iraqi forces. While Turkey is a NATO member, the US State Department lists the PKK as a terrorist organization.
The Houthi rebels in Yemen were seizing US-supplied weaponry on the battlefield and using them against the rightful owners, who were Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Additionally, some of these weapons were acquired by Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon. After being slain in Kashmir, pro-Pakistani Islamist terrorists and freedom fighters who had previously battled alongside the Afghan Taliban against the US and its Afghan allies were found to have been carrying weapons that the US had given to the old Afghan Army. Insurgents from Boko Haram fighting against US-armed soldiers from Chad, Niger, and Nigeria started using additional US weapons from Ukraine in the Lake Chad region of Africa.
Russian military historian and director of the Museum of Air Defense Forces, Yuri Knutov, said that the Hamas attack revealed the Iron Dome’s inefficiency.
The US has actually turned into one of the main sources of arms for international terrorists and freedom fighters. While Marjorie Taylor Greene is right to demand answers about the security of Israel, a longtime friend of the US, the same queries may be raised regarding practically every security assistance program launched by the US in the years following 9/11. It appears that America’s strategy for waging the worldwide war on terror has led to those it labels terrorists being more capable of committing the violent crimes that US policy purports to be trying to prevent. The sad fact is that America often becomes its friends’ biggest enemy in its haste to arm the world.
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