“The market has boomed over these past few months,” said another arms dealer, Hassan, who, after overcoming his initial fear about speaking with NIQASH, would only do so under an assumed name. “Prices have doubled, then tripled. The prices of some weapons are over ten times their usual value.”
Hassan, who was interviewed in the middle of a large field in a Karbala suburb, was also willing to talk about how he smuggled guns from Karbala to Baghdad. “The last shipment contained more than 200 Kalashnikov rifles and five machine guns. It was all hidden under a shipment of fruits and vegetables. And it’s not too hard,” he added. “We choose special routes where we know there won’t be any checkpoints, which means the trucks don’t have to pass through them.”
Recently Hassan has shipped five batches of weapons successfully and confirms that there are other parties sending guns through to the Anbar and Mosul areas, into Syria where they apparently end up with those Syrians fighting the Syrian government.
Hassan says he doesn’t care much where the guns end up. “It’s just a business deal,” he argues.
Most Iraqis are proud of their own weapons, purchasing and maintaining a wide number of arms – including heavier weaponry. This is particularly true in more lawless, tribal areas outside major cities and some sources say that tribal areas are actually the source of a lot of Iraq’s illegal arms trade.
As a result, Karbala’s Office of Tribal Affairs started a campaign, aimed at educating those responsible within the various tribal areas about the dangers of illegal gun trade.
The campaign talks about the dangers of an escalation in gun trafficking and also about fears that weapons might fall into the wrong hands, for instance, those of local extremists, who might use them in terrorist acts.
Comments are closed.