Finally, a journalist for a mainstream UK media outlet is methodically tracking weapons shipment serial numbers and English-language paperwork recovered from al-Qaeda groups in Syria, and he’s literally showing up at arms factories and questioning arms dealers, including officials at the Saudi Embassy in London, asking: why are your weapons in the hands of terrorists?
Veteran Middle East war correspondent Robert Fisk recently published a bombshell report entitled, I traced missile casings in Syria back to their original sellers, so it’s time for the west to reveal who they sell arms to. In it Fisk recalls a bit of detective sleuthing he’s lately been engaged in after stumbling upon a batch of missile casings and shipment paperwork last year hidden in what he describes as “the basement of a bombed-out Islamist base in eastern Aleppo” with the words “Hughes Aircraft Co/Guided Missile Surface Attack” emblazoned on the side of the spent tubes.
I
traced missile casings in Syria back to their original sellers, so
it’s time for the west to reveal who they sell arms to
I
don’t think either Nato or the EU has the slightest interest in
chasing the provenance of weapons in the hands of Islamist fighters
in Syria or anywhere else in the Middle East
Robert
Fisk
23
July, 2018
Readers,
a small detective story. Note down this number: MFG BGM-71E-1B. And
this number: STOCK NO 1410-01-300-0254. And this code: DAA A01
C-0292. I found all these numerals printed on the side of a spent
missile casing lying in the basement of a bombed-out Islamist base in
eastern Aleppo last
year. At the top were the words “Hughes Aircraft Co”, founded in
California back in the 1930s by the infamous Howard Hughes and sold
in 1997 to Raytheon, the massive US defence contractor whose profits
last year came to $23.35bn (£18bn). Shareholders include the Bank of
America and Deutsche Bank. Raytheon’s Middle East offices can be
found in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Israel, Egypt,
Turkey and Kuwait.
There
were dozens of other used-up identical missile casings in the same
underground room in the ruins of eastern Aleppo, with sequential
codings; in other words, these anti-armour missiles –
known in the trade as Tows, “Tube-launched, optically tracked and
wire-guided missiles” – were not individual items smuggled into
Syria through the old and much reported CIA smugglers’ trail from
Libya. These were shipments, whole batches of weapons that left their
point of origin on military aircraft pallets.
Some
time ago, in the United States, I met an old Hughes Aircraft
executive who laughed when I told him my story of finding his
missiles in eastern Aleppo. When the company was sold, Hughes had
been split up into eight components, he said. But assuredly, this
batch of rockets had left from a US government base. Amateur sleuths
may have already tracked down the first set of numbers above. The
“01” in the stock number is a Nato coding for the US, and the
BGM-71E is a Raytheon Systems Company product. There are videos of
Islamist fighters using the BGM-71E-1B variety in Idlib province two
years before I found the casings of other anti-tank missiles in
neighbouring Aleppo. As for the code: DAA A01 C-0292, I am still
trying to trace this number.
Even
if I can find it, however, I can promise readers one certain
conclusion. This missile will have been manufactured and sold by
Hughes/Raytheon absolutely legally to a Nato, pro-Nato or “friendly”
(i.e. pro-American) power (government, defence ministry, you name
it), and there will exist for it an End User Certificate (EUC), a
document of impeccable provenance which will be signed by the buyers
– in this case by the chaps who purchased the Tow missiles in very
large numbers – stating that they are the final recipients of the
weapons.
There
is no guarantee this promise will be kept, but – as the arms
manufacturers I’ve been talking to in the Balkans over the past
weeks yet again confirm – there is neither an obligation nor an
investigative mechanism on the part of the arms manufacturers to
ensure that their infinitely expensive products are not handed over
by “the buyers” to Isis, al-Nusra/al-Qaeda – which was clearly
the case in Aleppo – or some other anti-Assad Islamist group in
Syria branded by the US State Department itself as a “terrorist
organisation”.
Of
course, the weapons might have been sent (illegally under the terms
of the unenforceable EUC) to a nice, cuddly, “moderate” militia
like the now largely non-existent “Free Syrian Army”, many of
whose weapons – generously donated by the west – have fallen into
the hands of the “Bad Guys”; i.e. the folk who want to overthrow
the Syrian regime (which would please the west) but who would like to
set up an Islamist cult-dictatorship in its place (which would not
please the west).
Thus
al-Nusra can be the recipients of missiles from our “friends”
in the region – here, please forget the EUCs – or from those
mythical “moderates” who in turn hand them over to Isis/al-Nusra,
etc, for cash, favours, fear or fratricidal war and surrender.
It
is a fact, I’m sorry to recall, that of all the weapons I saw used
in the 15-year Lebanese civil war (1975-1990), not one was in the
hands of those to whom those same weapons were originally sold.
Russian and Bulgarian Kalashnikovs sold to Syria were used
by Palestinian guerrillas, old American tanks employed by the
Lebanese Christian Phalange/Lebanese forces were gifts from the
Israelis who received them from the US.
These
outrageous weapons shipments were constantly recorded at the time –
but in such a way that you might imagine that the transfers were
enshrined in law (“American-made, Israeli-supplied” used to
be the mantra). The Phalange, in fact, also collected bunches of
British, Soviet, French and Yugoslav armour – the Zastava arms
factory in the Serbian city of Kragujevac, which I have just visited,
featured among the latter – for their battles.
In
eastern Aleppo, who knows what “gifts” to the city’s surviving
citizens in the last months of the war acquired a new purpose?
Smashed Mitsubishi pick-up trucks, some in camouflage paint, others
in neutral colours, were lying in the streets I walked through. Were
they stolen by al-Nusra? Or simply used by NGOs? Did they
arrive, innocently enough, in the lot whose documents, also found in
Aleppo, registered “Five Mitsubishi L200 Pick Up” sent by
“Shipper: Conflict, Humanitarian and Security Department (Chase),
Whitehall SW1A SEG London”?
Of
course they did – alongside the Glasgow ambulance I found next to a
gas canister bomb dump on the Aleppo front line at Beni Zeid in 2016,
whose computer codings
I reported in The
Independent at
great length –
five codings in all – and to which the Scottish Ambulance Authority
responded by saying they could not trace the ambulance because they
needed more details.
But
back to guns and artillery. Why don’t Nato track all these weapons
as they leave Europe and America? Why don’t they expose the real
end-users of these deadly shipments? The arms manufacturers I spoke
to in the Balkans attested that Nato and the US are fully aware of
the buyers of all their machine guns and mortars. Why can’t the
details of those glorious end user certificates be made public – as
open and free for us to view as are the frightful weapons which the
manufacturers are happy to boast in their catalogues.
It
was instructive that when The
Independent asked
the Saudis last week
to respond to Bosnian weapons shipment documents I
found in eastern Aleppo last year (for 120mm mortars) – which the
factory’s own weapons controller recalled were sent from Novi
Travnik to Saudi Arabia – they replied that they (the Saudis) did
not provide support of any kind “to any terrorist organisation”,
that al-Nusra and Isis were designated “terrorist
organisations” by Saudi Royal Decree and that the “allegations”
(sic) were “vague and unfounded”.
But
what did this mean? Government statements in response to detailed
reports of arms shipments should not be the last word – and there
is an important question that remained unanswered in the Saudi
statement. The Saudis themselves had asked for copies of the shipment
documents – yet they did not specifically say whether they did or
did not receive this shipment of mortars, nor comment upon the actual
papers which The
Independent sent
them.
These
papers were not “vague” – nor was the memory of the Bosnian
arms controller who said they went with the mortars to Saudi Arabia
and whose shipment papers I found in Syria. Indeed, Ifet Krnjic, the
man whose signature I found in eastern Aleppo, has as much right to
have his word respected as that of the Saudi authorities. So what did
Saudi Arabia’s military personnel – who were surely shown the
documents – make of them? What does “unfounded” mean? Were the
Saudis claiming by the use of this word that the documents were
forgeries?
These
are questions, of course, which should be taken up by the
international authorities in the Balkans. Nato’s and the EU’s
writ still runs in the wreckage of Bosnia and both have copies of the
documents I found in Aleppo. Are they making enquiries about this
shipment, which Krnjic said went to Saudi Arabia, and the shipping
documents which clearly ended up in the hands of al-Nusra – papers
of which Nato and the EU had knowledge when the transfer was
originally made?
I
bet they’re not. For I don’t think either Nato or the EU has the
slightest interest in chasing the provenance of weapons in the hands
of Islamist fighters in Syria or anywhere else in the Middle East –
certainly not in the case of Damascus, where the west has just given
up its attempt to unseat Assad.
Indeed,
in a political landscape where “regime change” has become a
moral, ethical objective, there can be no moral, ethical
investigation of just how the merchants of death (the makers) manage
to supply the purveyors of death (the killers) with their guns and
mortars and artillery. And if any end user says that “allegations”
of third parties are “vague and unfounded” – always supposing
that the persons saying this are themselves “end users” – this,
I promise you, must be accepted as true and unanswerable and as solid
as the steel of which mortars are made
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