Saudis Step Up Help for Rebels in Syria With Croatian Arms
By C. J. CHIVERS and ERIC SCHMITT
Published: February 25, 2013 The New York Times
Saudi Arabia has financed a large purchase of infantry weapons from Croatia and quietly funneled them to antigovernment fighters in Syria in a drive to break the bloody stalemate that has allowed President Bashar al-Assad to cling to power, according to American and Western officials familiar with the purchases.
In Syria, a recoilless gun from the former Yugoslavia.
The M79 Osa, an anti-tank weapon of Yugoslav origin, seized from Syria’s opposition.
The weapons began reaching rebels in December via shipments shuttled
through Jordan, officials said, and have been a factor in the rebels’
small tactical gains this winter against the army and militias loyal to
Mr. Assad.
The arms transfers appeared to signal a shift among several governments
to a more activist approach to assisting Syria’s armed opposition, in
part as an effort to counter shipments of weapons from Iran to Mr.
Assad’s forces. The weapons’ distribution has been principally to armed
groups viewed as nationalist and secular, and appears to have been
intended to bypass the jihadist groups whose roles in the war have
alarmed Western and regional powers.
For months regional and Western capitals have held back on arming the
rebels, in part out of fear that the weapons would fall into the hands
of terrorists. But officials said the decision to send in more weapons
is aimed at another fear in the West about the role of jihadist groups
in the opposition. Such groups have been seen as better equipped than
many nationalist fighters and potentially more influential.
The action also signals the recognition among the rebels’ Arab and
Western backers that the opposition’s success in pushing Mr. Assad’s
military from much of Syria’s northern countryside by the middle of last
year gave way to a slow, grinding campaign in which the opposition
remains outgunned and the human costs continue to climb.
Washington’s role in the shipments, if any, is not clear. Officials in
Europe and the United States, including those at the Central
Intelligence Agency, cited the sensitivity of the shipments and declined
to comment publicly.
But one senior American official described the shipments as “a maturing
of the opposition’s logistical pipeline.” The official noted that the
opposition remains fragmented and operationally incoherent, and added
that the recent Saudi purchase was “not in and of itself a tipping
point.”
“I remain convinced we are not near that tipping point,” the official said.
The official added that Iran, with its shipments to Syria’s government,
still outstrips what Arab states have sent to the rebels.
The Iranian arms transfers have fueled worries among Sunni Arab states
about losing a step to Tehran in what has become a regional contest for
primacy in Syria between Sunni Arabs and the Iran-backed Assad
government and Hezbollah of Lebanon.
Another American official said Iran has been making flights with weapons
into Syria that are so routine that he referred to them as “a milk
run.” Several of the flights were by an Iranian Air Force Boeing jet
using the name Maharaj Airlines, he said.
While Persian Gulf Arab nations have been sending military equipment and
other assistance to the rebels for more than a year, the difference in
the recent shipments has been partly of scale. Officials said multiple
planeloads of weapons have left Croatia since December, when many
Yugoslav weapons, previously unseen in the Syrian civil war, began to
appear in videos posted by rebels on YouTube.
Many of the weapons — which include a particular type of Yugoslav-made
recoilless gun, as well as assault rifles, grenade launchers, machine
guns, mortars and shoulder-fired rockets for use against tanks and other
armored vehicles — have been extensively documented by one blogger,
Eliot Higgins, who writes under the name Brown Moses and has mapped the new weapons’ spread through the conflict.
He first noticed the Yugoslav weapons in early January in clashes in the
Dara’a region near Jordan, but by February he was seeing them in videos
posted by rebels fighting in the Hama, Idlib and Aleppo regions.
Officials familiar with the transfers said the arms were part of an
undeclared surplus in Croatia remaining from the 1990s Balkan wars. One
Western official said the shipments included “thousands of rifles and
hundreds of machine guns” and an unknown quantity of ammunition.
Croatia’s Foreign Ministry and arms-export agency denied that such
shipments had occurred. Saudi officials have declined requests for
interviews about the shipments for two weeks. Jordanian officials also
declined to comment.
Danijela Barisic, a spokeswoman for Croatia’s Ministry of Foreign
Affairs, said that since the Arab Spring began, Croatia had not sold any
weapons to either Saudi Arabia or the Syrian rebels. “We did not supply
arms,” she said by telephone.
Igor Tabak, a Croatian military analyst, said that after a period when
many countries in the former Yugoslavia sold weapons from the Balkan
wars on black markets, Croatia, poised this year to join the European
Union, now strictly adheres to international rules on arms transfers.
“I can’t imagine bigger quantities of weapons being moved without state
sanctioning,” he said. “It is not impossible, but it is just very
improbable.” He added that it was possible that such weapons could be
moved by the intelligence services, though he offered no evidence that
that was the case.
Syria’s rebels have acquired their arms through a variety of means,
including smuggling from neighboring states, battlefield capture,
purchases from corrupt Syrian officers and officials, sponsorship from
Arab governments and businessmen, and local manufacture of crude rockets
and bombs. But they have remained lightly equipped compared with the
government’s conventional military, and have been prone to shortages.
An official in Washington said the possibility of the transfers from the
Balkans was broached last summer, when a senior Croatian official
visited Washington and suggested to American officials that Croatia had
many weapons available should anyone be interested in moving them to
Syria’s rebels.
At the time, the rebels were advancing slowly in parts of the country,
but were struggling to maintain momentum amid weapons and ammunition
shortages.
Washington was not interested then, the official said, though at the
same time, there were already signs of limited Arab and other foreign
military assistance.
Both Ukrainian-made rifle cartridges that had been purchased by Saudi
Arabia and Swiss-made hand grenades that had been provided to the United
Arab Emirates were found by journalists to be in rebel possession.
And Belgian-made rifles of a type not known to have been purchased by
Syria’s military have been repeatedly seen in rebel hands, suggesting
that one of Belgium’s previous rifle customers had transferred the
popular weapons to the rebels.
But several officials said there had not been such a visible influx of new weapons as there has been in recent weeks.
By December, as refugees were streaming over Syria’s borders into Turkey
and Jordan amid mounting signs of a wintertime humanitarian crisis, the
Croatian-held weapons were back in play, an official familiar with the
transfers said.
One Western official familiar with the transfers said that participants
are hesitant to discuss the transfers because Saudi Arabia, which the
official said has financed the purchases, has insisted on secrecy.
Jutarnji list, a Croatian daily newspaper, reported Saturday that in
recent months there had been an unusually high number of sightings of
Jordanian cargo planes at Pleso Airport in Zagreb, Croatia’s capital.
The newspaper said the United States, Croatia’s main political and
military ally, was possibly the intermediary, and mentioned four
sightings at Pleso Airport of Ilyushin 76 aircraft owned by Jordan
International Air Cargo. It said such aircraft had been seen on Dec. 14
and 23, Jan. 6 and Feb. 18. Ivica Nekic, director of the agency in
charge of arms exports in Croatia, dismissed the Croatian report as
speculation.
Labels: Conflict, Europe, Munitions, Revolution, Saudi Arabia, Syria
posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, February 26, 2013
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