US supports Iraq with $4bn worth of weapons

The US government is poised to sell billions of dollars worth of military equipment and maintenance support to Iraq at a time when the Baghdad government is struggling to fend off a resurgent al-Qaida movement at home. Since July, the Pentagon has notified Congress of more than $4 billion worth of Foreign Military Sales (FMS) to Iraq that includes everything from infantry carriers to ground-to-air rockets. Defence experts say the US support is nothing new, adding that it seeks to help the national Iraqi army deal with the internal and external threats ahead of the transition phase. Military news website Defence News claims that the US support comes as Iraq ponders external responses to "the continuing ?Kurdish independence movement in the north, the Syrian civil war to the west, and the potential of ?a nuclear Iran along its eastern border."? Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies told the website: "Iraq is moving back ?to a primary state of civil war, and its internal focus is coming back to counterinsurgency and ?counter terrorism. "The recent announcement of a potential sale of air defence systems may be useful against a potential outside threat, but the real world problems in Iraq are very much dominated by internal stability." The US Inspector General for the reconstruction of Iraq programme said on July 18 that Iraq had ?put forward 479 requests to obtain military equipment that amount to $15 billion, while the US funding amounted to $850 million. Iraq signed an agreement with Washington to buy 36 F-16 fighter jet two years ago. The Iraqi government paid the first instalment of that deal for 18 planes in September 2011. In July 2013, the Iraqi Ministry of Defence said that it wanted to purchase more fighters jets from the US in the near future. The US is the main weapons supplier of the Iraqi armed forces, with ?Russian and some eastern European countries also on the list.