U.S. Weapons from Iraq Making Their Way to Turkey

The administration likes to accuse Iran of arming the insurgency. It is possible that the greatest threat to our troops safety is our own government. Remember those missing 190,000 AK47s. Well, there is a thriving black market in weapons that goes on under the very noses of our military command. Some of those weapons are almost certainly failing into the hands of our enemies. At the very least these guns are certainly not helping our situation any:

Turkish police displayed evidence this week of what they say is the growing black-market trade of weapons of U.S. origin being smuggled across the border from neighboring Iraq.

In the border town of Mardin in southeastern Turkey, officers unwrapped 18 Austrian-made Glock pistols and laid them on a table. Mardin Police Chief Ismet Tasan said the guns were originally donated by the U.S. military to the Iraqi police. The pistols were later sold to arms dealers in northern Iraq for more than $1,500 apiece and then smuggled to Turkey, where they can be resold for prices as high as $5,000.

[...]Last month, the Turkish government announced it was finding disturbingly high numbers of weapons of apparent American origin, including Glock pistols, AK-47s and M-16s, in the hands of captured Kurdish separatists from the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK.

The PKK has battled the Turkish state since 1984, operating from camps in mountains along the Iraqi border. Both the United States and its NATO ally, Turkey, officially label the PKK a terrorist organization.