Rebels boast of new missiles
But regime goes low tech with bombs that maim
ALEPPO, SYRIA — It was long past midnight, but the rebel commander couldn’t sleep until his fighters returned from the Turkish border with the latest shipment of gear meant to help them battle the Syrian army. Wearing camouflage pants and black flipflops, he waited anxiously, his eyes bloodshot.
In the morning, his team arrived with their prize: a single suitcase of night-vision goggles. For the first time, his brigade’s snipers would be able to strike back at night against regime snipers who already have nightvision capabilities.
“We need one for every fighter,” said the commander, Osama, who leads one of the rebel brigades fighting in Aleppo. He said the goggles were provided by a “sympathizer” in Europe, but refused to elaborate.
The process still appears to be haphazard and improvised, far from the reliable, organized pipeline that rebels have sought for much of the 19-month-old uprising against the regime of President Bashar Assad. Instead, it often remains a scramble by individual units in the highly fragmented rebel forces to obtain what they can.
Most units still rely on their staple arsenal of automatic weapons, hand grenades and rocket-propelled grenades, adapted to fit their needs.
But there have been notable advances. Most importantly, anti-aircraft missiles have made their first appearances in rebel hands in recent weeks, a weapon that some fighters boast could turn the tide against the regime.
Assad’s forces have adapted, too, although surprisingly they have at times turned more low-tech for the needs of urban warfare against guerrillas.
Rebel fighters say the most terrifying new regime weapons are cluster munitions, which scatter “bomblets” over a large area, and so-called “barrel” bombs. The latter are literally barrels packed with explosives, metal shards and sometimes fuel-soaked igniting sand that are shoved out of helicopters or airplanes and can cause horrendous blasts and casualties.
“My sense is that the rebels are winning this war,” said Jeffrey White, who studies Syria for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “They are winning by inches and the regime is doing its best to use its assets in innovative ways, but it is basically losing that fight.”
The rebels have long asked sympathetic countries to arm them, complaining that they cannot get strong enough weapons to face Assad’s arsenal of tanks, artillery, mortars and warplanes.
Though there have been reports that Gulf Arab countries have funnelled some arms, many rebel brigades say they have not received any such shipments. For most of the conflict, they have relied on smugglers and weapons captured from the Syrian military.
Commander Osama showed the Associated Press a sampling of the improvised armoury his brigade of several hundred men has collected.
Assault rifles hung from the walls, and bullets, mortars and rocketpropelled grenades sat in boxes nearby.
One rifle had a telescopic sight crudely welded to its body to turn it into a sniper’s rifle. His men bought the scopes separately for $150 each and assembled them to rifles.
“It’s not really good, but we have to do what we can,” he said.
He also showed a rocket-propelled grenade launcher that his men captured in a recent raid on an army garrison. It was a much larger calibre than the RPGs his men have and can disable the regime’s most advanced tanks — but only if the shooter gets within 400 metres.
In what would be a significant advance, an official with the Free Syrian Army, the rebel’s loose umbrella group, who is involved in procuring weapons said the rebels have now obtained dozens of shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles. Speaking in Turkey, he would not say who provided the rockets. He spoke on condition of anonymity for security reasons.
Several videos posted by anti-regime activists online last week show the missiles.
It remains unclear how many SA-7 missiles rebels have and if they can use them successfully. But “even if they don’t bring anything down, it will make Syrian pilots think more about what they are doing,” White said.
Rebels claimed to have shot down at least two helicopters and two jets in August and September.
In the past week alone, however, amateur videos indicate they’ve shot down one jet and two helicopters. In one case, a video purported to show the capture of the jet pilot. In another, a rebel held up what he said was the head of another pilot, salvaged from the wreckage of his helicopter.
From its side, Assad’s regime has adjusted its professional military — built to fight a war with Israel — to fight guerrillas in Syrian cities.
On Saturday, an AP reporter visited a mosque in Aleppo that was hit by a barrel bomb three days earlier, killing at least 10 people. An annex to the mosque was razed, and the mosque itself and a half-dozen nearby apartment buildings nearby were severely damaged.
Amateur videos of barrel bombs that have failed to explode show t hem as large, metal containers filled with explosives and metal shards that are pushed manually f rom aircraft and detonate on impact with the ground.