As The US Strikes At ISIS, Here's A Look At What The Jihadists Have In Their Arsenal
Stringer/Reuters
The Al Qaeda splinter group has massacred members of Iraq's Yazidi religious minority and broadcast the murder of an American journalist on YouTube.
Now the target of a sustained campaign of American airstrikes, ISIS has previously declared the establishment of a caliphate and changed its name to simply the Islamic State underscoring its ambition to become a permanent feature on the map of the Middle East.
ISIS wouldn't have been able to carve out such a vast domain, or present itself as a state-like entity capable of controlling territory and ruling over a population of millions, if it hadn't been armed to the hilt, partly from its seizure of military equipment from fleeing Iraqi soldiers and plundered Syrian military bases.
When ISIS overran Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city, in June, they captured weaponry that allowed them to arm themselves like a conventional army, rather than a ragtag insurgency.
"You lost approximately three divisions worth of equipment and probably at least three depots in that area," Anthony Cordesman, a security analyst at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, told The Wall Street Journal.
More recently, ISIS captured anti-aircraft weaponry from an air force base in eastern Syria, including rockets capable of bringing down planes flying at 16,000 feet.
A large quantity of the weapons that ISIS has seized were supplied by the U.S. to the Iraqi Army. ISIS also fields weapons produced in Russia, China, the Balkans, and Iran.
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