US commander says 190,000 missing US guns went to Iraqi forces

BAGHDAD - US commander in Iraq David Petraeus said Tuesday he believes 190,000 unaccounted-for pistols and AK-47 assault rifles were issued to Iraqi police and soldiers.
"We believe those weapons all certainly were given to Iraqi units," he told Fox News Radio.
However, the US military has no record of where they went, he conceded, according to an advance transcript of his interview with the Alan Colmes show to be broadcast later Tuesday.
"We weren't going to stay there in the dark and make guys do a serial-number inventory and sign them up and that is what happened," the general said.
A July 31 report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said the military "cannot fully account for about 110,000 Soviet-designed AK-47 assault rifles, 80,000 pistols, 135,000 items of body armor and 115,000 helmets reported as issued to Iraqi forces."
The weapons disappeared from records between June 2004 and September 2005, as the military struggled to rebuild the disbanded Iraqi forces from scratch amid increasing attacks from Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias.
Petraeus confirmed the conclusions of the GAO, the investigative arm of the US Congress.
"Those units did have advisors, but they did not have the property book officer, they did not have the property book records that we would associate with normal procedures and yet they were units that needed to go into the fight. The Iraqi government was under enormous pressure," he said.

08/07/2007 23:33 GMT