US: Iraq ‘Not Doing Enough’ to Block Iranian Flights to Syria

'We Continue to Press the Issue'

The Obama Administration has been constantly harping on Iraq to block flights from Iran to Syria, claiming those flights are filled with weapons and fighters for Syria’s ongoing civil war.

The claim has been reiterated a lot, but Iraq has searched a lot of Iranian planes and never found anything in the way of weaponry. Instead of admitting their mistake, the US is just angry at Iraq for “not doing enough.”

That was the message from State Department official Brett McGurk, who insisted that the US “continue to press the issue” with Iraq, and that they keep doing inspections but not coming up with the weapons the US was hoping to discover.

The US doesn’t have that problem with its own weapons smuggling operations into Syria, with those arms flowing in through Turkey and Jordan without any real problem, except for the tendency of al-Qaeda factions to rob the warehouses they are stored in once they arrive in Syria.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.