US Missiles Bound for Iraq Could Fall Into ISIS' Hands

The U.S. is sending Iraq shoulder-launched anti-tank missiles to help thwart suicide vehicle bomb attacks, which the Islamic State (ISIS) used last weekend in capturing the city of Ramadi, according to reports.

The new weapons, numbering 1,000, were in the pipeline before Ramadi fell and are due to arrive in Iraq by mid-June, Bloomberg reports.

But the shipments take place amid concern about how ISIS forces are able to arm themselves — with U.S.-supplied weapons abandoned by or taken from the Iraqi military.

The fall of Ramadi, a key city 70 miles from the capital of Baghdad, "repeats a pattern in which defeated Iraq security forces have … left behind U.S.-supplied military equipment," which is then seized by ISIS and has to be destroyed by U.S. airstrikes, The Associated Press reports.

The Pentagon said Iraqi troops fleeing Ramadi abandoned artillery as well as dozens of military vehicles including tanks, armored personnel carriers and Humvees, the AP reports.

"This is how we get our weapons," says the narrator of an ISIS video posted online last weekend that shows Humvees sitting idle and boxes of unused American mortar shells and bullets at a captured Iraqi police station, The New Yorker reports.

"The Iraqi officials beg the Americans for weapons, and then they leave them here for us," the narrator gloats.

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