By Paul Tait BAGHDAD, April 22 (Reuters) - Iraqi security forces will start replacing their AK-47 rifles this year with the M-16s and M-4s used by U.S. troops, which will help track the weapons and cut down on theft, a senior U.S. military official said. Lieutenant-General Martin Dempsey, in charge of training Iraq's security forces, said keeping track of the thousands of weapons that have flooded Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 had been a major challenge. Under an urgent need to arm Iraqi forces, weapons had been supplied by coalition members and Iraqi procurements, and captured weapons had also been used, Dempsey said. Now the country is awash with guns, with the ubiquitous AK-47 assault rifle a common sight on almost every street corner and the most popular selling item on the weapons black market. "It's been somewhat complicated," Dempsey told reporters. The Brookings Institution, a U.S. think tank, said in 2006 that the flow of weapons from Iraq's now 325,000-strong security forces to the black market posed a dilemma for U.S. commanders. They had to choose between properly equipping the Iraqis and risk seeing arms fall into the hands of insurgents or providing inferior weapons that would make it harder to fight them. Now the U.S.-made M-16s and M-4s will be matched to their users with a sophisticated database using fingerprints and retinal scans, as well as serial numbers on the rifles. "The government of Iraq will be able to track those weapons very, very carefully," Dempsey said. The AK-47s handed in would then be registered in the database before being redistributed to new units formed as Iraq takes over security control from U.S.-led forces, he said. Dempsey did not put a price tag on the weapons handover or give an exact date for when it would begin. But he said the Iraqi government had allocated $7.3 billion, or 20 percent of its 2007 budget, to security forces and would spend $9 billion over the next 18 months. Washington would contribute a further $5 billion over the same period. U.S. President George W. Bush is battling Democrats over new financing for the war. He is being pressed to accept a pull-out timetable for U.S. troops in return for $100 billion in funds. Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is also under pressure from his fractious government to set a timetable for a U.S. withdrawal but says that will not happen until Iraqi security forces are ready to take over.
