The Pentagon’s battle against the Islamic State relies on an Eastern European arms supply line operated, in part, by firms linked to fraud, foreign bribery, Bulgarian organized crime, and the death of a contractor.
President Obama promised not to arm Kurdish units fighting in the Syrian civil war. But new evidence shows that Serbian mortars bought by the Pentagon ended up in their hands.
The Pentagon is on the hunt for Soviet-style arms across Eastern Europe -- and it’s using questionable contractors and misleading documents to get the weapons to their final destination: Syria.
Romania and Bulgaria’s ports served as key transport hubs in the Pentagon’s supply-line which fueled millions of bullets and tens of thousands of Soviet-style weapons to US-backed rebels in Syria.
"How a batch of heavy machine guns travelled illegally from a Serbian state-owned factory to Syrian rebels via a Bulgarian arms tycoon and a Saudi military base manned by US intelligence personnel."
"Saudi Arabia bought Serbian-made Coyote machine gun through BIEM, a Bulgarian firm owned by Petar Mandjoukov, a long-time arms dealer, media tycoo,n and a former agent of the Communist-era State Security."
"Zagreb sold a record amount of aging weapons and ammunition to Saudi Arabia in 2016, ignoring evidence the arms are regularly being diverted to Syria."
"The European Union’s foreign policy unit is monitoring the flow of weapons to the Middle East and into the hands of Islamist groups in Syria, including the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), following an investigation by Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN)."
"An arms broker who sold almost 300 tons of aging Yugoslav-era weapons and ammunition to Saudi Arabia says “It’s no concern of mine” if the Gulf kingdom later diverts them to Syria."
Serbian Prime Minister Aleskandar Vucic has defended arms sales to Saudi Arabia, in response to OCCRP/BIRN revelations that Serbia was among countries that approved the export of at least €1.2 billion in weapons to states backing Syrian rebels.
An unprecedented flow of weapons from Central and Eastern Europe is flooding the battlefields of the Middle East.
Dozens of cargo flights have transported thousands of tons of Soviet-style weapons and ammunition between Central and Eastern Europe and the Middle East in the past year, most likely headed to the war in Syria.
