ERBIL, Kurdistan Region—The Islamic State had a sophisticated weapons manufacture and supply chain, able to provide made-to-order arms on a “quasi-industrial scale,” according to documentation of the group’s improvised weapons factories in Fallujah compiled by an organization tracking the supply and use of weapons in armed conflict.
“[S]ingle workshops have manufactured many thousands of weapons over a matter of months,” reads the report from Conflict Armament Research (CAR). “This large-scale, and highly organised, production supplies IS with a range of improvised rockets and bombs to supplement its arsenal of military grade weapons.”
A CAR investigative team entered Fallujah on June 29, three days after the city’s liberation from ISIS by the Iraqi army and paramilitaries.
The team found numerous workshops, set up in a highly organized manner and containing machinery, component parts, and chemical compounds indicating that “IS [Islamic State] forces engaged in large-scale improvised weapon production.”
The militant group’s Committee for Military Development and Production oversaw the production, coordinating labour and supply, as well as weapons testing, and was active in Fallujah until Iraqi forces launched their operation on the city in late May.
The extensive documentation left behind by the militants “suggests a sophisticated production chain, involving seven different workshops responsible for various stages of a weapon’s production.”
The workshops in Fallujah were supplying improvised weapons across its self-proclaimed caliphate, including to the Baghdad area.
CAR found similar evidence of weapons manufacturing in Kobane, Tikrit, and Ramadi after the liberation of those cities from ISIS.
In early June, an apparent accident at an Islamic State weapons depot, the Eastern Sulfur Factory, in Gayara, south of Mosul, killed 10 militants. Head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) in Mosul, Ismat Rajab, reported that “people in nearby areas were poisoned” by the effects of the explosion leading to speculation that the militant group may have been making chemical weapons at the factory.
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