Tag Archives: U.S. weapons

“I assure you the United States will stand with you,” Biden told Zelenskyy

Biden-Zelenskyy-shake-hands

Important Takeaways:

  • Biden meets with Zelenskyy in Paris, apologizes for delay in U.S. weapons that let Russia make gains
  • The meeting in the French capital comes as the United States clashes with Kyiv and the Kremlin over the decision to let Ukraine strike inside Russia using American weapons.
  • He also announced a new package of $225 million in weapons, including air defense interceptors, artillery ammunition and other critical capabilities.
  • It follows the D-Day 80th anniversary events in Normandy, where Biden drew parallels between that pivotal battle to free Europe from Nazi domination and Ukraine’s current fight against Russia.

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Escalation of War in Ukraine as first US missile launched into Russian territory

NATO-Wall-of-Drones

Important Takeaways:

  • Ukraine last night claimed it successfully hit a missile system inside Russia using U.S. weapons.
  • It said the country’s forces destroyed Russian missile launchers with a strike in the Belgorod region.
  • Senior politician Yehor Chernev claimed Ukrainian forces used a High Mobility Rocket Artillery System, or HIMARS, The New York Times reported.
  • Meanwhile, Joe Biden has ruled out Ukraine joining NATO in a major policy shift. The development comes after the defense alliance’s members, including the US and Britain, released a communique last year declaring ‘Ukraine’s future is in NATO’.
  • While his remarks were met with heavy criticism in Kyiv, analysts believe Mr. Biden’s comments could bring a settlement closer.
  • Russia has repeatedly referred to Ukraine’s possible membership of NATO to justify its invasion and occupation of the country.
  • It comes as NATO countries are set to collaborate to create a ‘drone wall’ on the security alliance’s eastern flank that aims to provide round-the-clock monitoring of threats across the border from Russia and Belarus.

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U.S., European weapons used to commit war crimes in Iraq: Amnesty

Shi'ite fighters gather to fight ISIS

ERBIL, Iraq (Reuters) – Militias fighting alongside Iraqi troops against Islamic State are committing war crimes using weapons provided to the Iraqi military by the United States, Europe, Russia and Iran, Amnesty International said on Thursday.

The rights group said that the predominantly Shi’ite Muslim militias, known collective as the Hashid Shaabi, were using weapons from Iraqi military stockpiles to commit war crimes including enforced disappearances, torture and summary killings.

Hashid Shaabi rejected Amnesty’s accusation as “lies”.

Parliament voted for the Hashid to formally become part of Iraq’s armed forces in November but the session was boycotted by Sunni Muslim representatives, who worry the move will entrench Shi’ite majority rule as well as Iran’s regional influence.

Iraqi and Western officials have expressed serious concern about the government’s ability to bring the Shi’ite militias under greater control.

“International arms suppliers, including the USA, European countries, Russia and Iran, must wake up to the fact that all arms transfers to Iraq carry a real risk of ending up in the hands of militia groups with long histories of human rights violations,” Amnesty researcher Patrick Wilcken said.

States wishing to sell arms to Iraq should ensure strict measures to ensure weapons will not be used by militias to violate human rights, he added in a statement.

Hashid spokesman Ahmed al-Assadi denied Amnesty’s report.

“These lies falsify truths and contribute directly or indirectly to the continuation of struggles that the Iraqi people and the people of neighbouring countries suffer from,” he told a news conference aired by state television.

“This is very clear in this report when it is purposefully slandering an official government institution,” he added, calling for an inquiry into Amnesty’s sources.

Amnesty cited nearly 2-1/2 years of its own field research, including interviews with dozens of former detainees, witnesses, survivors, and relatives of those killed, detained or missing.

Its report focused on four powerful militia groups, most of which receive backing from Iran: the Badr Organisation, Asaib Ahl al-Haq, Kataib Hezbollah and Saraya al-Salam.

The Hashid deny having sectarian aims or committing widespread abuses. They say they saved the nation by pushing Islamic State back from Baghdad’s borders after the army crumbled before the jihadists’ lightning advance in 2014.

There have been few accusations of serious abuses by the Hashid since the start of a major offensive on Oct. 17 to retake the northern city of Mosul from Islamic State. Various Hashid groups have joined in that battle, and a top U.S. general told The Daily Beast last week they had been “remarkably disciplined”.

(Reporting by Girish Gupta and Saif Hameed; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

Hezbollah using U.S. weaponry in Syria: senior Israeli military officer

Smoke rises as seen from a governement-held area of Aleppo, Syria

By Ori Lewis

TEL AVIV (Reuters) – Israel has informed the United States that Lebanese Hezbollah fighters in Syria are using U.S. armored personnel carriers originally supplied to the Lebanese Army, a senior Israeli military officer said on Wednesday.

The U.S. State Department said last month that the American embassy in Beirut was working to investigate images on social media purporting to show Hezbollah, which supports President Bashar al-Assad, displaying U.S. military equipment in Syria.

Those images were widely reported to have been of U.S.-made M113 armored personnel carriers, which the State Department said were extremely common in the region.

In an intelligence briefing to foreign reporters in Tel Aviv, the senior officer showed a photograph of military vehicles, which he said included U.S.-made armored personnel carriers (APCs), along a road.

“These APCs are of the Hezbollah, while fighting in Syria, that they took from the Lebanese armed forces,” he said in English, describing the guerrilla group as dominant in Lebanon.

“We shared this information with other countries, including the U.S. of course, and I can even say that we recognized these specific APCs with some specific parameters that we know … these were given to the Lebanese armed forces. It’s not an assumption,” said the officer, who under the rules of the briefing could not be identified by name, rank or position.

Western diplomatic sources have said the APCs were delivered to the Lebanese Army by the United States as part of a program to equip that force.

The officer made no comment about when the APCs would have been supplied to the Lebanese Army.

The officer said Hezbollah has 8,000 fighters in Syria where more than 1,700 of the group’s combatants have been killed since 2011.

Israel and Hezbollah, which the officer said has 30,000 members, half of them combatants, last fought a war in 2006.

(Editing by Jeffrey Heller)