More than 190,000 AK-47 rifles and pistols given to Iraqi security forces in 2004 and 2005 are missing, raising fears that US and British troops are fighting an enemy armed with American weapons.

According to a damning report issued by the US Congress’s investigative office, the Pentagon has lost track of 110,000 rifles, 80,000 pistols, 135,000 items of body armour and 115,000 helmets.

The report, by the non-political Government Accountability Office, said that from June 2004 to September 2005 US officials in Iraq reported issuing 355,000 weapons to local security forces and are now unable to account for more than half of them.

The number of missing weapons produced by the audit is far higher than previously suspected. Last year a similar report estimated that about 14,000 US weapons were unaccounted for.

The GAO audit said that weapons distribution was rushed and haphazard and failed to follow established rules of accountability. It focused on the period when training of Iraqi security forces was led by General David Petraeus, now the ground commander in charge of President Bush’s “surge” strategy. The report states that from 2004 until the end of 2005 no central record was kept of weapons distribution.

The Pentagon did not dispute the findings. According to the GAO, the Pentagon still does not have a standard recording system. It said that its review of the 2007 property books found continuing problems with missing and incomplete records.

In relation to the missing weapons, the US military was consistently unable to find supporting documents to “confirm when the equipment was received, the quantities of equipment delivered and the Iraqi units receiving the equipment.”

The reports added that the failure to track the weapons was due to a lack of staff, together with a rush to equip nascent Iraqi forces as the insurgency gained strength in 2004 and 2005. It appears that the US military was rushing out weapons to Iraqi units as fast as possible, with little oversight. Some of those units, particularly in places such as Fallujah, have since dissolved or merged back into the civilian population.

Since 2003, the US Congress has provided about $19.2 billion (£9.5 billion) to develop and train Iraqi security forces, according to the GAO report. The Pentagon has recently asked for a further $2 billion to continue the training programme, a cornerstone of the Bush administration’s strategy in Iraq.

Mark Kimmitt, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence for the Middle East, said that, in view of the matters raised by the report, the Department of Defence was reviewing its policies and procedures to ensure that equipment reached the troops for whom they were intended.

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