![]() Raw materials came from cannibalizing steel pipe and melting down scrap. Iraq’s oil fields provided the industrial base-tool-and-die sets, high-end saws, injection-molding machines-and skilled workers who knew how to quickly fashion intricate parts to spec. Some they looted from the Iraqi or Syrian governments, but when those ran out they did something that no terrorist group has ever done before and that they continue to do today: design their own munitions and mass-produce them using advanced manufacturing techniques. A conventional war required conventional arms-mortars, rockets, grenades-which, as an international pariah, ISIS could not buy in sufficient quantities. ![]() Many of ISIS’ leaders were veterans of that insurgency, but as they began ramping up their war against the Iraqi government in 2014, they knew they needed more than IEDs and AK-47s to seize territory and create their independent Islamic State. But while Chuckwagon is barely discoverable by Google, Spleeters’ detailed reports for CAR are both publicly available online and contain more useful information than any classified intelligence I ever received when I was commanding a bomb disposal unit for the US military in Iraq in 2006. The work Spleeters does is typically undertaken by secretive government offices, such as the US Defense Intelligence Agency’s Military Material Identification Division, known as Chuckwagon. In another context, he’d be mistaken for a hipster barista, not an investigator who has spent the past three years tracking down rocket-propelled grenades in Syria, AK-47-style rifles in Mali, and hundreds of other weapons that have found their way into war zones, sometimes in violation of international arms agreements. He is 31 years old, with a 1980s Freddie Mercury mustache and tattoos covering thin arms that tan quickly in the desert sun. Spleeters is a field investigator for Conflict Armament Research (CAR), an international organization funded by the European Union that documents weapons trafficking in war zones.
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