By Max Delany
QARAQOSH, Iraq — Factories churning out tens of thousands of munitions and an entire street turned into a conveyor belt for car bombs: advances by Iraqi forces around Mosul have laid bare the scale of the arms industry of Daesh (the so-called IS).
In the more than two years since it seized control over swathes of the country, Daesh established a sprawling and highly organized system that experts say no other insurgent group has matched.
The capability has seriously boosted the threat from the group as it battles ferociously to cling to territory in Iraq and Syria — and the fresh intelligence could now prove vital in countering its plots to carry out attacks on the West.
Iraqi army deminer Hashim Ali picked his way carefully through the rubble as he explained how Daesh transformed Mart Shmony street in Qaraqosh, some 16 km southeast of Mosul, into a production line of death after seizing the town in 2014 and forcing the mainly Christian population to flee.
Once it was a bustling thoroughfare of car workshops and stores selling Turkish furniture, but for the militants it offered all they needed to make the armored car bombs they use to blow up civilians and slow advancing Iraqi troops. In one building they stripped the vehicles, in the neighboring one they cut the metal plates for armor. A few doors down they made the explosives. Just up the road they loaded the bombs into the car.
"These people are not stupid, they are very well organized," Ali told AFP. "If you give them more time then they always find ways to surprise you."
Nearby the remnants of a pickup truck with a metal plate welded to its front stood inside a former furniture shop devastated by an air strike from the US-led coalition backing Iraqi troops.
In towns, villages and districts retaken from Daesh the pattern was repeated. AFP visited a number of sites where the group cannibalized existing infrastructure to create their own improvised arms factories.
In a former cement plant in the town of Areej the lathes in a cavernous hall had been put to work manufacturing mortars and rockets. Molds for shells lay on tables and unfinished casings littered the floor. At another location nearby, part of an abandoned gas storage facility was strewn with the deadly improvised explosive devices Daesh produced there. The white powder of homemade explosives spilled out of large bombs that the group had not had time to lay in the path of the advancing troops.
'Something else'
"In terms of scale, planning, centralized command and control and the precision to which they are manufacturing, this is something else," James Bevan, director of Conflict Armament Research, a UK-based group which investigates arms flows around the globe, told AFP.
"I can't name another armed group that manufactures on such a scale and with such a degree of coordination."
Bevan and teams from his organization have been on the ground in Iraq cataloguing the extent of Daesh arms production.
Their findings, detailed in a report released Wednesday, show a sophisticated system that pours out tens of thousands of standardized mortars, rockets and explosives on an "unprecedented scale" and under strict quality controls.
While the raw materials for shell casings and missiles come from scrap metal and spare parts in the cities that Daesh have captured, the explosives and propellant are made from precursors mostly procured in bulk from the open market in Turkey and diverted through Syria.
As proof of their high standards the final Daesh products are often painted a military green, branded with the group's logo and packed into specially made crates to be dispatched to the various fronts it is fighting on. — AFP
