EDMONTON/630 CHED
2/27/2009
Canadian mentors say Afghan army soldiers issued Canadian assault rifles are being put through background checks to ensure they have no connection to insurgents.
The troops being handed C7 rifles as part of a program to re-equip the fledgling army with NATO-standard weapons are checked against a United Nations list of known terrorists or associates before they're allowed into training.
Captain Dario Colussi, the logistics officer for the Operational Mentoring and Liason Team, says the rifles are not given out ad-hoc.
The Government Accountability Office in Washington recently issued a scathing report that warned the United States had lost track of as many as 242,000 light weapons donated to the Afghans and some of them might be in the hands of the Taliban.
In addition, there are no reliability records showing what happened to an additional 135,000 weapons donated by other NATO countries. (The Canadian Press,blb)
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