In a stockpile of some 150 weapons and a range of ammunition and IEDs, Iraqi forces recovered this Nazi-era rifle during operations against Islamic State in the Al-A’amiriya district of Baghdad in January 2016. While researchers were unable to trace its path from Germany to Iraq, its place in the battlefield is indicative of how arms pass from one conflict to the next for generations. It’s still not the oldest weapon ever found by the group. CAR Director James Bevan says in South Sudan he documented a German rifle from 1898 in South Sudan, with ammunition dating to the same year. It fired “perfectly fine,” he said.

This item represents one of the fastest cases of a weapon being diverted from the U.S. military into the hands of ISIS. Manufactured in Bulgaria, this firing mechanism for an anti-tank missile was exported on Dec. 12, 2015 to the U.S. Army. It was recovered during the Battle of Ramadi on Feb. 9, 2016. The same model weapon, with an identical lot number, was documented in the possession of the Syrian opposition faction Jaysh al-Nasr. That suggests that group could have been the intended recipient.

What looks like an American-made M-16 at first glance is really a Chinese manufactured CQ rifle. CAR researchers found one of these weapons in Kobani, Syria, in 2015 and another in the possession of rebel forces in Jonglei, South Sudan, two years earlier. Both had their serial numbers removed and painted over, and were loaded with the same Chinese ammunition, which was manufactured in 2008. That suggests the weapons emerged from the same source. Researchers are uncertain how the weapons reached Syria.

Commonly used as an artificial sweetener, researchers found vast quantities of sorbitol in Islamic State weapons factories, where it was combined with other chemicals to make rocket fuel. The bags documented by CAR were made by the French company Tereos and passed through several intermediaries before ending up with Islamic State, going through Germany, Turkey and Syria before being documented in Iraq. According to CAR, these documented shipments of sorbitol from Turkey to Syria in 2015 were five times larger than all of the exports from the previous year.