Tag Archives: Syria

Ammo.

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            C.J. Chivers came to reporting for the New York Times by an unusual rout. He graduated from Cornell in 1987, then went in the Marines as an officer. He served in the First Gulf War, then in peace-keeping operations in Los Angeles after the Rodney King riots. He left the Marines as a captain in 1994. Graduate school in journalism at Columbia followed. His first reporting job came with the Providence Journal in Rhode Island. He worked there from 1995 to 1999. In 1999 he moved to the Times, where he had the police beat until 2001. Thereafter he became a foreign correspondent covering the wars with radical Islam. He’s covered the Americans war in Afghanistan, the Russian war with Chechnya, and the American war in Iraq. Lately, he’s been covering the wars in Ukraine and Syria.

As a former Marine, Chivers knows more than does the usual reporter about military weapons. As a war correspondent in the Greater Islamic Area, he’s run into a lot of AK-47s. These qualifications give his reporting a certain cast. He can make firearms themselves tell an interesting story about the conflicts in which they are used. For example, he wrote The Gun (2010), a history of the AK-47. (See: The Gun That Made the Nineties Roar; The Arms Barometer).

Recently, he published a story about the ammunition that has been recovered on the battlefields where troops have engaged ISIS. It turns out that ISIS captures much of its ammunition from defeated foes. Indeed, it appears to select target for attack to some degree or in some cases by the prospect of capturing important stocks of weapons. It isn’t hard to do because a lot of the opponents of ISIS don’t put up much of a fight. Sometimes, anti-Assad groups of Syrians rebels or the Syrian troops they are supposed to be fighting just sell to ISIS the arms that they have been given by foreign patrons.

About 80 percent of the ammunition examined came from the Soviet Union before its collapse, post-Soviet Russia, the United States, China, or from Serbia (the perpetual bad-boy of international morality). A lot of the ISIS ammo came out of captured Syrian warehouses—or off dead Syrian troops. The Soviet Union/Putinia were long-terms sponsors of Syria, so about 18-19 percent of the ammo was manufactured in some version of whatever we’re calling Russia this week. Most of this was produced between 1970 and 1990. So, did the Russkies stop selling to the Syrians from 1990 on? Or was more recently supplied ammo stored in warehouses closer to the center of power? Or was this AK-47 ammunition purchased by the US government from an American re-seller of ammo to fit the AK-47 and other Russian weapons and then given to either Iraqi security forces before they were supplied with American M-16s or to Syrian “moderates”? About 26 percent was manufactured in China during the 1980s, but it is impossible to tell when it was shipped to Syria. About 18 percent of it was manufactured in the United States during the 2000s, so this is ammo supplied to the Iraq security forces after the American invasion of Iraq. Probably, most of this ammo came into the possession of ISIS after the collapse of the Iraqi army in Spring-Summer 2014.[1]

The story by Chivers complicates the Obama administration’s idea of building up “moderate” alternatives to ISIS. For one thing, why is it necessary to train and arm “moderate” fighters when the solution that occurred to ISIS was to go get the weapons that they needed by brute force? Why didn’t “moderates” seize the arms they needed from Syrian forces? Fpr another thing, “moderates” appear to have sold some of the weapons that they have received to ISIS to avoid trouble. Won’t they do that with any new weapons that they receive?

[1] C.J. Chivers, “ISIS’ Ammunition Is Shown to Have Origins in U.S. and China,” NYT, 6 October 2014.

Shi’a pets.

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The Prophet Muhammad died in 632 AD. Who should succeed him as “caliph,” the leader of the Faithful? Should the succession be “elective” in the sense of someone chosen from among Muhammad’s chief followers? If so, then the leading candidate was Abu Bakr, Muhammad’s father-in-law and a powerful prop of Islam. Or should the succession be “hereditary” in the sense of someone chosen from among Muhammad’s sons-in-law so that the blood of the Prophet would run in the veins of future caliphs? If so, the leading candidate was Ali, the favored son-in-law. The majority supported the “elective” solution: Abu Bakr became the caliph. Ali and his followers sulked and schemed. Eventually Ali seized power as the fourth caliph, only to be assassinated. Since the debate over the succession, Islam has been split between a majority which sprang out of the supporters of Abu Bakr, the Sunni, and a minority that sprang from the “party of Ali,” the Shi’a[t Ali].[1] Eventually, the caliphate passed to the Ottoman sultan. The majority of Ottoman subjects were Sunni Muslims, with Shi’ites a minority located in what would become Syria and what would become Iraq. The great majority of Shi’ites were found in Persia/Iran.

Events in the 1980s turned up the flame under this conflict. The Iranian Revolution led to the creation of a revolutionary theocratic republic. Saddam Hussein’s attack on Iran led to a long war in which other Sunni states supported Iraq. Iran largely created the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon.

At the start of the Twenty-First Century, Syria under the Assad dictatorship offered a mirror-image to Iraq under the Hussein dictatorship. In the former, a Shi’a minority ruled a Sunni majority in the latter, a Sunni minority ruled s Shi’a majority.[2] The overthrow of these regimes then opened the door for the oppressed minorities to seek revenge.[3] Since the beginning of the Syrian civil war in March 2011, the Assad government has seen half the country secede from its control. In Iraq, the Maliki government got right to business as soon as they had waved good-bye to the all-too-willing Americans in 2011.

Both sides in the Syrian civil war have found supporters among their co-religionists abroad. Shi’ite Iran and the Shi’ite government of Iraq have aided the Shi’ite Assad government. Sunni Qatar, Sunni Saudi Arabia, and Sunni foreign fighters have supported the Sunni Islamists who are doing most of the heavy lifting against the Assad government in Syria and who have attacked the Shi’ite government in Iraq.[4] (See: “A Dog in This Fight?”)

“The Sunni-Shi’ite War,” The Week, 1 November 2013, p. 9.

[1] Wait. They’re fighting a gory war over something that happened 1400 years ago? Well, not exactly. During the 1400 years the two sects developed different religious practices which divide them. They also developed a history of conflict, oppression, and resistance linked to these two different faith traditions. So, they’re fighting a gory war over stuff that began 1400 years ago and continued—in widely varying degrees of intensity—down to the present. It probably isn’t helpful to try to analogize it to history-based conflicts in Western culture, like Protestant versus Catholic in Northern Ireland or the struggle for African-American civil rights.

[2] Do minorities create dictatorships as a defensive response to past or potential threats from the majority? That’s a political science question, rather than a historical question.

[3] While effete Italians assert that “revenge is a dish best tasted cold,” Arabs appear to prefer take-out.

[4] Is it possible to compare the Syrian Civil War to the Spanish Civil War? Or aren’t young Muslims entitled to a romantic commitment to an idealistic cause that subsequently turns out to be soiled by Great Power scheming?