Investigation by “financial times”: who and how supplies weapons to the terrorists of the Islamic State (photo). What weapons do Islamists use in Syria? What are ISIS armed with?

“Habibi! Aluminum!"

A loud exclamation echoes through the cluttered courtyard of a house in the city of Tal Afar, far in northern Iraq. It's the end of September, but it's still hot outside. The heat seems to flow from everywhere, even rising from the ground. The city itself is empty, except for feral stray dogs and young people holding their own.

"Habibi!" - Damien Spleeters shouts again. So he affectionately Arabic calls his Iraqi translator and local colleague Haider al-Hakim.

Spleeters is a visiting investigator for the EU-funded international organization Conflict Armament Research (CAR), which monitors arms trafficking in war zones. He is 31 years old, has a Freddie Mercury mustache from the 1980s, and his thin arms, quickly tanned by the southern sun, are covered with tattoos. In another setting, he might have been mistaken for a hipster bartender rather than an investigator who has spent the last three years tracking the smuggling of grenade launchers in Syria, AK-47-style assault rifles in Mali and hundreds of other types of weapons and ammunition that they end up in war zones in different ways, sometimes in violation of existing international agreements. The kind of work that Spleeters does is typically performed by secret government agencies such as the Defense Intelligence Agency's Warfare Identification Unit, known as the Chuckwagon. But if the word Chuckwagon can be found with great difficulty in Google, Spleeters’ detailed reports for CAR are always present on the Internet in open access, and you can find much more in them useful information than all the intelligence I received while commanding an explosive ordnance disposal unit in Iraq in 2006.
During that war, militants blew up American soldiers with improvised explosive devices. The devices that I encountered during my business trips were mostly buried by the militants in the ground or activated by placing them in a car, which in this case turned into a large moving bomb. Such cars were blown up in markets and near schools, and after the explosions, the gutters were filled with blood. But mostly these were crudely made primitive devices, the parts of which were glued together with tape and epoxy resin. The few rockets and mines that the militants received were old, of poor quality, often did not have the necessary detonators, and they did not always explode.

Many of the leaders of ISIS were veterans of this insurgency, and when they began the war against the Iraqi government in 2014, they perfectly understood that in order to seize territory and create their own independent Islamic state, only improvised explosive devices and Kalashnikov assault rifles will not be enough for them. A serious war requires serious weapons, such as mortars, rockets, grenades, but ISIS, being an outcast in the international arena, could not buy these in sufficient quantities. They took some from the Iraqi and Syrian government forces, but when they ran out of ammunition for these weapons, the Islamists did what no terrorist organization had ever done before: they began designing their own ammunition, and then began mass-producing it. , using fairly modern production technologies. The oil fields of Iraq became their production base because they had tools and dies, high-quality cutting machines, injection molding machines - and skilled workers who knew how to quickly turn complex parts to specified dimensions. They obtained raw materials by dismantling pipelines and melting scrap metal. ISIS engineers churned out new fuses, new missiles and launchers, and small bombs that the militants dropped from drones. All this was done and assembled in accordance with the plans and drawings made by the responsible ISIS functionaries.

Since the conflict began, CAR has conducted 83 inspection trips to Iraq, gathering information on weapons, and Spleeter has participated in nearly all of the investigations. The result was a detailed and extensive database of 1,832 weapons and 40,984 pieces of ammunition found in Iraq and Syria. CAR calls it "the most comprehensive collection of weapons and ammunition captured from ISIS to date."

That's how this fall Spleeters found himself in a grubby house in Tal Afar, where he sat over an 18-liter bucket of aluminum powder paste and waited for his assistant to appear. Al-Hakim is a bald, well-dressed man, somewhat reminiscent of a sophisticated urban snob, which sometimes makes him seem foreign body in a trashed ISIS workshop. The men easily establish contact and understanding, but at the same time Al-Hakim acts as the host, and Spleeters is always a respectful guest. Their job is to notice little things. Where others see trash, they find clues, which Spleeters then photographs and examines, looking for subtle serial numbers that may reveal the origins of the find.

For example, as for aluminum paste, ISIS craftsmen mix it with ammonium nitrate and obtain a powerful explosive for mines and warheads rockets. Spleeters found similar buckets, from the same manufacturers and sellers, in Fallujah, Tikrit and Mosul. “I like it when I see the same material in different cities", he tells me. The fact is that repeated discoveries allow him to identify and describe various links in the ISIS supply chain. “This confirms my theory about the industrial revolution of terrorism,” says Spleeters. “And also why they need raw materials on an industrial scale.”

Spleeters is constantly looking for new weapons and ammunition in order to understand how the expertise and professionalism of ISIS engineers is developing. Arriving in Tal Afar, he seized on a promising new lead: a series of modified rockets that had appeared in ISIS propaganda videos that the organization shows on YouTube and other social media.
Spleeters suspected that the fuses, detonation mechanisms and fins for the new missiles were made by ISIS engineers, but he believed that the warheads came from somewhere else. After discovering several types of similar munitions over the past six months, he concluded that ISIS may have captured ammunition from Syrian anti-government forces, which were secretly supplied with weapons by Saudi Arabia and the United States.

But to prove this, he needed additional evidence and evidence. Spleeters believes that if he can find more launchers and warheads, he will be able to obtain sufficient evidence for the first time that the Islamic State is using US-supplied high-powered munitions in combat against the Iraqi army and its American partner forces. special purpose. ISIS itself could hardly do such things modern ammunition. This would mean that he had new and very serious opportunities and aspirations. These circumstances also provide an alarming glimpse into the future nature of wars, where any group anywhere can begin home-grown weapons production using materials from the Internet and 3D printing.

Almost all military ammunition, from rifle cartridges to aircraft bombs, regardless of country of origin in a certain way are marked. Conventional markings allow one to determine the date of manufacture, the manufacturing plant, the type of explosive used as a filler, as well as the name of the weapon, which is called nomenclature. For Spleeters, this marking is a document “that cannot be falsified.” Stamped impressions on hardened steel are very difficult to remove or alter. “If it says that the ammunition is from such and such a country, it is 99% true,” he says. - And if not, then you can still determine that it is a fake. And this is something completely different. Every detail matters."

One afternoon at the Iraqi military base in Tal Afar, Spleeters was arranging 7.62mm cartridges to photograph the markings on each shell. At this point I told him that I had never met a person who loved ammunition so much. “I take that as a compliment,” he said with a smile.

It was a love affair that began when Spleeters was a newly minted reporter working for a newspaper in his native Belgium. “There was a war going on in Libya at the time,” he says of civil war 2011. He really wanted to understand how Belgian-made rifles got to the rebels who fought against Gaddafi. He believed that if this connection were revealed, the Belgian public would become interested in this conflict, to which they had not shown any attention.

Spleeters began sifting through Belgian diplomatic correspondence in search of additional information about secret government transactions, but this gave him little. He decided that the only way to get to the bottom of what was happening was to go to Libya himself and personally trace the path of these rifles. He bought a plane ticket using the money from the grant he received and got to work. “You know, it was a little strange,” he says. “I took a vacation to go to Libya.”
Spleeters found the rifles he was looking for. He also discovered that this kind of search gave him much more satisfaction than reading materials about these weapons on the Internet. "There's a lot to be written about guns," he said. - Weapons loosen people's tongues. It can even make the dead speak.” Spleeters returned to Belgium as a freelance journalist. He has written several articles on the arms trade for French-language newspapers, as well as a couple of reports for think tanks such as the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey. However, the life of a freelancer turned out to be very unstable, and so Spleeters put aside his journalistic pen and in 2014 came to work at Conflict Armament Research as a full-time investigator.

During one of his first assignments with the organization, to the Syrian city of Kobani, he worked among dead ISIS fighters whose bodies were thrown directly onto the battlefield, where they rotted and decomposed. Spleeters found one AK-47 style rifle with pieces of rotting meat stuck in the curves and recesses of the fore-end and wooden handle. Everywhere there was a sweetish smell of decay and decay. Among the corpses, he also found 7.62 mm cartridges, PKM machine guns and ammunition for the RPG-7 grenade launcher. Some of these weapons were stolen from the Iraqi army. These finds convinced him of the enormous value of field work. He says the information he has cannot be obtained by following news and videos online. “On all this social media, when I see ammunition or small arms from a distance, sometimes it can be like, ‘Yeah, that’s an M16.’ But if you look up close, it’s clear that it’s a Chinese CQ-556 rifle, which is a copy of the M16. But to understand this, you have to look closely,” he tells me, adding that the camera hides much more than it shows. And if you look at the weapon in person, it may turn out that it is from a different manufacturer, and thus has a different origin. You wouldn't guess that from watching a grainy YouTube video.

The war between ISIS and Iraqi government forces is a series of intense battles fought on the streets of cities from house to house. In late 2016, as government forces battled ISIS for the northern city of Mosul, Iraqis discovered that the Islamic State was producing munitions large caliber at secret factories located throughout the area. To study these ammunition factories in Mosul, Spleeters went there while the fighting was still going on there. One day, while Spleeters was photographing a weapon amid the sound of flying bullets, he saw the Iraqi bodyguard who was supposed to be guarding him trying to cut off the head of a dead ISIS fighter with a butcher knife. The blade of the knife was dull, and the soldier was upset. Finally, he walked away from the corpse.

From Mosul Spliters brought some important information. But coalition airstrikes destroyed much of the city, and by the time government forces declared victory in July, much of the evidence had already been destroyed or lost. As ISIS began to lose ground in Iraq, Spleeters became concerned that the group's weapons production system might be destroyed before he or anyone else could document its full potential. He needed to get to these factories before they were destroyed. Only then could he describe their contents, understand their origins and identify supply chains.

At the end of August, ISIS troops were very quickly driven out of Tal Afar. Unlike other cities that were razed to the ground, there was relatively little destruction in Tal Afar. Only every fourth house there was destroyed. To find additional evidence and information about the secret production and supply of weapons, Spleeters needed to get to this city very quickly.

In mid-September, Spleeters flew to Baghdad, where he met with Al-Hakim. He then drove for nine hours, guarded by an Iraqi military convoy of machine-gun-equipped trucks, north along a highway that had only recently been cleared of improvised explosive devices. The last stretch of the road to Tal Afar was deserted, pockmarked by explosions. The burnt fields around the road were black.

The Iraqi army controls southern parts of Tal Afar, while Iran-backed, mostly Shia militias from the Hashd al-Shaabi (Popular Mobilization Forces) hold control of the north of the city. The relationship between them is very tense. My driver was Kurdish and he spoke little English. As we approached the first checkpoint and the man saw the Hashd al-Shaabi flag, he turned to me with alarm.

“I am not Kurdi. You are not America,” he said. We were silent at the checkpoint and they let us through.

We arrived in Tal Afar on a hot evening. We made our first stop at a fenced area where, according to Al-Hakim, a mosque could be located. There, at the entrance, lay several shells for a bomb launcher. At first glance, they have a very simple design and are similar to standard American and Soviet mortar shells. But if the mines have standard calibers (60mm, 81mm, 82mm, 120mm, etc.), then these shells are 119.5mm in caliber to match the internal diameter of the steel pipes that ISIS uses as a launcher. This difference may seem like a small thing, but the projectile must fit very tightly into the launch tube so that there is sufficient pressure of the powder gases to eject it. ISIS has very strict tolerances and quality requirements, sometimes down to tenths of a millimeter.

Ammunition confiscated from ISIS fighters (banned in the Russian Federation) near Mosul

At the back of the building were several tanks connected by a steel pipe, as well as large barrels of black liquid. Something was dripping from one tank and some disgusting growths had formed on it. “Do you think it’s rust?” Splitters asks Al-Hakim. It is clear that the liquid is toxic. It looks like the vomit of a drunk who threw up on his shirt. But Spleeters cannot take samples and do tests. He has no laboratory instruments, no protective suit, no gas mask.

“It stings my eyes,” says Al-Hakim. There is a pungent, irritating smell in the yard, as if paint had just been spilled there. Nearby are bags of caustic soda for disinfection.

“Yes, everything here is somehow suspicious,” Spleeters agrees with Al-Hakim. We'll be leaving soon. The black liquid could be an incendiary substance such as napalm or some poisonous industrial chemical, but Spleeters can't say for sure what is being produced in these tanks. (He later learns that he could have identified the manufacturing process if he had taken more high-quality photographs of the pressure gauges and their serial numbers. Spleeters says that no matter what information he collects in the field, he always has the feeling that he forgot something .)

After a short drive through quiet, shell-pocked streets, we arrive at an unremarkable building, similar to all the other houses on the block. A stone wall, iron gates, separate rooms around a courtyard, shady trees that provide a welcome coolness. Mortar barrels and artillery shells lie among the abandoned shoes and bedding. Spliters expertly casually pushes them aside.

At the back of the yard, he notices something unusual. A neat hole has been punched in the concrete wall - you can immediately see that it was made by hand and not by a projectile. Behind the wall is a large open space with many tools and half-collected ammunition. It is covered with a tarpaulin to hide the contents from enemy drones. The smell of machine oil is in the air.

Spleeters immediately understands what kind of place this is. This is not a warehouse, such as he has seen and photographed in large quantities. This is a production workshop.

On the table he notices small bombs, like the ones ISIS makes. Such a bomb has an injection molded plastic body and a small tail for stabilization in the air. These bombs can be dropped from drones, as we often see in videos on the Internet. But they can also be fired from grenade launchers of AK-47 type assault rifles.

Nearby there is a site for making fuses. On the floor near the lathe lie piles of shiny shavings in a spiral shape. Most often, ISIS fuses resemble a conical silver plug with a safety pin threaded through the body. The fuze design is elegantly minimalist, although it is not nearly as simple as it seems. The uniqueness of this device is its interchangeability. ISIS's standard fuze sets off all of its rockets, bombs and mines. Thus, the militants managed to solve a serious engineering problem. In the interest of safety and reliability, the United States and most other countries create separate fuses for each type of ammunition. But ISIS's fuses are modular, safe, and, according to some experts, they rarely misfire.

Spleeters continues his work at the back of the factory yard. And then he notices something special - those converted rockets he was looking for. They are in various stages of production and preparation, and assembly instructions are written on the walls with a felt-tip pen. Dozens of warheads of dismantled ammunition are waiting their turn to be remade. They lie in a dark outbuilding on a long table next to calipers and small containers for homemade explosives. Each individual workspace itself is a treasure trove of information that provides insight into ISIS's weapons and ammunition program. But there are a lot of jobs here, and so the abundance of clues creates something of a sensory overload. “Oh my God, look at this. And look here. God, come over there. God, God, wow,” mutters the amazed Spleeters, moving from one workplace to another. He’s like Charlie in a chocolate factory.

However, night falls on Tal Afar, and there is no electricity in the city. This means that Spleeters will no longer be able to study his treasures and photograph samples in natural light. Soon our convoy returns to the Iraqi military base, located near the destroyed city airport. It is a small outpost of refurbished trailers, half of which are riddled with bullet holes. In the trailer next to us, two detained militants who are suspected of belonging to ISIS are sleeping. This is a young man and an older man. They appear to be the only ones captured during the Battle of Tal Afar. Spleeters spends the evening impatiently watching satellite television. During all the time we spent together, he did almost nothing except work and eat, and slept only a few hours.

It dawned quite early, and when the soldiers woke up, Spleeters returned, accompanied by a convoy, to the workshop. He takes out 20 yellow crime scene stickers, one for each table. He then draws a diagram to later reconstruct the configuration of the room. At one place in this diagram it denotes welding electrodes, on the other there is a grinding machine. “No, this is not a continuous process,” he thinks out loud. “Most likely, these are different work areas for making different things.”

Spleeters then begins to take photographs, but suddenly the entire room is filled with Iraqi intelligence officers who have learned about this small plant. They open all the drawers, take out every electrical board, kick out shavings and scraps of metal, take away papers, and pull handles. Unused ammunition is fairly safe as long as you don't throw it fuze head down, but dismantled shells and mines are quite unpredictable. In addition, there may be booby traps inside the workshop. But that's not what worries Spleeters. He despairs over something else.

“Habibi,” he declares, “they must not touch or take away anything here. It's important to keep everything together because the whole point is to learn it at the same time. If they take something away, everything will be meaningless. Can you tell them that?”

“I told them,” Al-Hakim replies.

“They can do whatever they want when I’m done,” Spleeters says wearily.

In a small room adjacent to the launch tube manufacturing area, Spleeters begins examining dozens of grenades. various models for grenade launchers. Some of them were made many years ago, and each has some kind of identification mark. On Bulgarian-made grenades, the number “10” or “11” is indicated in a double circle. The green dye used by China and Russia varies slightly in shade. “We are at war with the whole world in Iraq,” one soldier had boasted to me two days earlier, referring to the many foreign fighters recruited by ISIS. But exactly the same impression arises when you look at weapons from the most different countries, concentrated in one room.

Spleeters carefully examines the warheads of the rockets stacked in rows, and finally finds what he needs. “Habibi, I found a PG-9 shell,” he exclaims, looking towards Al-Hakim. This is Romanian missile, having batch number 12-14-451. Splitters all last year I was looking for this exact serial number. In October 2014, Romania sold the US military 9,252 PG-9 grenades with lot number 12-14-451 for grenade launchers. By purchasing this ammunition, the United States signed an end-user certificate. This is a document confirming that this ammunition will be used only in the American army and will not be transferred to anyone. The Romanian government confirmed the sale by providing CAR with an end-user certificate and proof of delivery of the goods.

However, in 2016, Spleeters saw a video made by ISIS that showed a box of PG-9 shells. He thought he noticed the batch number 12-14-451. The ammunition was captured from the Syrian militant group Jaysh Suriya Al-Jadeed. Somehow, PG-9s from this batch ended up in Iraq, where ISIS technicians separated the stolen grenades from the starting powder charge, and then improved them, adapting them to combat in urban environments. Grenade launchers cannot be fired inside buildings due to the dangerous jet stream. But by attaching ballast to the grenade, engineers created such ammunition that can be used when conducting combat operations inside buildings.

So how? American weapons ended up in the hands of ISIS? Spleeters can't say for sure yet. On July 19, 2017, the Washington Post reported that U.S. officials had been secretly training and arming Syrian rebels from 2013 until mid-2017, when the Trump administration ended the training program, in part out of concern that U.S. weapons might end up in the wrong hands. The US government has not responded to multiple requests for comment on the situation and how this weapon ended up with Syrian rebels and an ISIS ammunition factory. The government has also refused to say whether the United States has violated the terms of its end-user certificate and, by extension, whether it is complying with the terms of the U.N. Arms Trade Treaty, which it is a signatory to along with 130 other countries.

It appears that other countries are also buying and reselling weapons. CAR traced how Saudi Arabia purchased various types of weapons, which were later found in ISIS militant groups. In one case, Spleeters checked the flight plan of a plane that was supposed to deliver 12 tons of ammunition to Saudi Arabia. Documents show that this plane did not land Saudi Arabia, and flew to Jordan. Sharing a border with Syria, Jordan is a well-known point of transfer of weapons to rebels fighting the Assad regime. Although the Saudis could have claimed that the weapons were stolen or captured, they did not. The people in charge of the flight insist that the plane with the weapons landed in Saudi Arabia, although flight documents refute this. The Saudi government did not respond to requests for comment on how its weapons ended up in the hands of ISIS.

“This is war,” Spleeters says. - It's a damn mess. Nobody knows what's going on, and that's why conspiracy theories always arise. We live in a post-truth era, when facts no longer mean anything. And while I do this work, I can sometimes grab hold of irrefutable facts.”

Most of the new generation of terrorism and future war scenarios involve the use of artificial intelligence, unmanned aerial vehicles and self-propelled vehicles with explosives. But this is only a part that reflects the fears of American engineers about the numerous possibilities for using new technologies. The other, much more dangerous part of the story concerns ISIS technicians. These people have already shown that they can make weapons that are not inferior to what makes military industry states And over time, it will be even easier for them to set up the production process, since 3D printing is becoming widespread around the world. Michigan Technological University mechanical engineering professor Joshua Pearce is an expert on open source hardware, and he says ISIS's manufacturing process has "very insidious features." In the future, schematic drawings of weapons can be downloaded from secret sites on the Internet, or received through popular social networks with encoding, such as WhatsApp. These files can then be loaded into metal 3D printers, which last years are widely used and cost no more than a million dollars, including setup. Thus, weapons can be made by simply pressing a button.

“Making weapons using layer-by-layer printing technology is much easier than it seems,” says Art Of Future Word project director August Cole, who works for the Atlantic Council. The rate at which ISIS's intellectual capital spreads depends on the number of young engineers joining its affiliates. At least 48% of jihadist recruits from non-Western countries attended college, and almost half of them studied engineering, according to Oxford University researchers. Of the 25 people involved in the September 11 attacks, at least 13 were college students, and eight were engineers. Among them are the two main organizers of the attacks, Mohammed Atta and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Mohammed received a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of North Carolina. The Associated Press reported that while in an American prison, he received permission to create a vacuum cleaner from scratch. Is this a meaningless hobby, as the CIA officials claim, or the hallmark of an inventor? Mohammed downloaded the drawings of the vacuum cleaner from the Internet.

Spleeters had only two days to study the munitions factories in Tal Afar. On the last evening he was in a hurry, trying to do as much as possible more work. ISIS uses distributed production methods. Each section specializes in a specific task, like a car factory. And Spleeters tried to describe and document all these sites and jobs. “We only have one hour left,” he said, looking at the sun as it inexorably sank towards the horizon. At the first plant, Spleeters found a huge smelting furnace, around which lay raw materials waiting their turn to be melted down: engine units, scrap metal, heaps of copper wire. There were also vices with molds for fuses, and next to them lay the empennage for mortar shells. All this was awaiting its turn for assembly in the next workshop. This work was carried out on the ground floor of a three-story building that was once a market. The stove was also installed on the lower level, because it gave off incredible heat. The entire city of Tal Afar was turned into a production base.

Spleeters quickly finishes collecting evidence. “Is there anything left?” he asks an Iraqi army major. “Yes, there is,” the major replies, approaching the next door. There is a large stove in the lobby that ISIS fighters covered with their handprints by dipping them in paint. It looked like a first-grader's picture of a child. In the corridors lay clay molds for the mass production of 119.5 mm shells. In the next courtyard there is something like a research laboratory. There is ammunition everywhere, new and old, lighting shells, and cutaway models. The tables are littered with dismantled fuses and huge 220mm ammunition. This is the largest caliber created by ISIS engineers. In addition, there were large pipes used as launchers. They were the size of a telephone pole.

The sun is starting to set. Spleeters asks again if there is anything else. The major again answers in the affirmative. In 24 hours we visited six enterprises, and I understand that no matter how many times Spliters asks his question, the answer will always be the same. But evening comes, and Spleeters' time is running out. The remaining factories will remain uninspected, at least until next time.

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Protests against President Bashar al-Assad in March 2011 escalated into a bitter and bloody civil war in which more than 250,000 people have been killed, hundreds of thousands have become refugees and much of the country lies in ruins. Several opposition, terrorist, gangster groups and violent Islamic State jihadists across the country continue to fight President Assad's government forces with whatever weapons they can get their hands on.

Today we will look at what weapons oppositionists and terrorists use to fight against government troops in Syria.

The rocket mortar (volcano) is made from a mechanical excavator with four pipes.

Projectiles made from gas cylinders can fly at a distance of up to three kilometers.

A collection of other improvised weapons from the last few years of the bloody conflict.

The so-called Free Syrian Army fires a homemade rocket at President Bashar al-Assad's government forces in Ashrafiyeh, Aleppo

Militants fire a homemade catapult at Assad's troops during clashes in the eastern Syrian city of Deir ez-Zor.

Militants prepared a homemade rocket launcher on the streets of Aleppo.

A homemade armored vehicle, called Sham-2, belonging to the Al-Ansar Brigade, 4 km west of Aleppo. From a distance it looks more like a large rusty metal box. The Sham-2, named after ancient Syria, is built on a car chassis.

Inside a homemade armored vehicle, rebels use a monitor to aim their machine gun.

A Free Syrian Army fighter with a homemade sniper rifle in eastern Damascus.

In February 2014, suicide bomber Abu Suleiman al-Britani drove a truck loaded with explosives into the wall of Aleppo Central Prison. As a result of the explosion, 300 prisoners of Jabhat al-Nusra militants held by Syrian troops were freed.

Terrorist militants make homemade mortar shells inside a house in the old city of Aleppo.

A member of the Ansar Dimahq brigade prepares to fire a homemade mortar on one of the front lines in Damascus.

A member of a terrorist organization turns a projectile on a lathe at a factory in Aleppo.

Terrorist militants use a catapult to launch a homemade bomb during clashes with government forces in the city of Aleppo.

Homemade military vehicle called Sham-1

Militants of a terrorist organization are making homemade missiles in Latakia.

Militants of the terrorist organization make not only weapons, but also improvised gas masks.

74-year-old retired officer Abu Tarek wears a homemade gas mask made from a plastic bottle, coal, cotton, gauze and cardboard.

Homemade rockets with gasoline containers at the end, Aleppo. (Reuters Photo):

We have already shown the homemade Sham-2 armored personnel carrier once, but it is worth taking another look. While sitting inside it, you can control the machine gun using a video game controller. (Reuters Photo):

Inside Sham-2. A real armored car, 100% made in Syria, which the rebel creators are very proud of. (Reuters Photo):

Homemade bombs made from decorative New Year's balls, Aleppo. (Reuters Photo):

Homemade mortar, Aleppo. (Reuters Photo):

A fighter lights a grenade with a cigarette before launching it with a catapult. (Reuters Photo):

Basically, catapults are large slingshots. (Reuters Photo):

Aiming a gun using a video camera, Deir al-Zor. (Reuters Photo):

Homemade cannon in action. (Reuters Photo):

These are local magicians, jacks of all trades. The rebels often turn shell shells themselves on lathes in their basements. (AFP Photo):

This is how the homemade weapons of the Syrian rebels appear. (Reuters Photo):

Making shells for mortars. (Reuters Photo):

Armored car. (Reuters Photo):

Preparing to launch a rocket towards government troops. (AFP Photo):

A simple grenade launcher. (Reuters Photo):

Painting a rocket at home. (Reuters Photo):

A whole artillery installation. (Reuters Photo):

Homemade grenades. (Reuters Photo):

A gun. Tourist option. (Photo by Reuters).

Where do ISIS weapons come from?

“Habibi! Aluminum!"

"Habibi!" - Damien Spleeters shouts again. This is what he affectionately calls his Iraqi translator and local colleague Haider al-Hakim in Arabic.

During that war, militants blew up American soldiers with improvised explosive devices. The devices that I encountered during my business trips were mostly buried by the militants in the ground or activated by placing them in a car, which in this case turned into a large moving bomb. Such cars were blown up in markets and near schools, and after the explosions, the gutters were filled with blood. But mostly these were crudely made primitive devices, the parts of which were glued together with tape and epoxy resin. The few rockets and mines that the militants received were old, of poor quality, often did not have the necessary detonators, and they did not always explode.

Many ISIS leaders organization banned in Russia - approx. lane) were veterans of this insurgency, and when they started the war against the Iraqi government in 2014, they were well aware that improvised explosive devices and Kalashnikov assault rifles alone would not be enough for them to seize territories and create their own independent Islamic state. A serious war requires serious weapons, such as mortars, rockets, grenades, but ISIS, being an outcast in the international arena, could not buy these in sufficient quantities. They took some from the Iraqi and Syrian government forces, but when they ran out of ammunition for these weapons, the Islamists did what no terrorist organization had ever done before: they began designing their own ammunition, and then began mass-producing it. , using fairly modern production technologies. The oil fields of Iraq became their production base because they had tools and dies, high-quality cutting machines, casting machines—and skilled workers who knew how to quickly turn complex parts to specified dimensions. They obtained raw materials by dismantling pipelines and melting scrap metal. ISIS engineers churned out new fuses, new missiles and launchers, and small bombs that the militants dropped from drones. All this was done and assembled in accordance with the plans and drawings made by the responsible ISIS functionaries.

Context

From Russia with blood

Foreign Policy 10/18/2010

The National Interest 12/12/2017

The National Interest 12/07/2017

The National Interest 05.12.2017
Since the conflict began, CAR has conducted 83 inspection trips to Iraq, gathering information on weapons, and Spleeter has participated in nearly all of the investigations. The result was a detailed and extensive database of 1,832 weapons and 40,984 pieces of ammunition found in Iraq and Syria. CAR calls it "the most comprehensive collection of weapons and ammunition captured from ISIS to date."

That's how this fall Spleeters found himself in a grubby house in Tal Afar, where he sat over an 18-liter bucket of aluminum powder paste and waited for his assistant to appear. Al-Hakim is a bald, well-dressed man with something of a sophisticated urban snob, which at times makes him seem like a foreign body in ISIS's cluttered workshop. The men easily establish contact and understanding, but at the same time Al-Hakim acts as the host, and Spleeters is always a respectful guest. Their job is to notice little things. Where others see trash, they find clues, which Spleeters then photographs and examines, looking for subtle serial numbers that may reveal the origins of the find.

For example, when it comes to aluminum paste, ISIS craftsmen mix it with ammonium nitrate to create a powerful explosive for mines and rocket warheads. Spleeters found similar buckets, from the same manufacturers and sellers, in Fallujah, Tikrit and Mosul. “I like it when I see the same material in different cities,” he tells me. The fact is that repeated discoveries allow him to identify and describe various links in the ISIS supply chain. “This confirms my theory about the industrial revolution of terrorism,” says Spleeters. “And also why they need raw materials on an industrial scale.”

Spleeters suspected that the fuses, detonation mechanisms and fins for the new missiles were made by ISIS engineers, but he believed that the warheads came from somewhere else. After discovering several types of similar munitions over the past six months, he concluded that ISIS may have captured ammunition from Syrian anti-government forces, which were secretly supplied with weapons by Saudi Arabia and the United States.

But to prove this, he needed additional evidence and evidence. Spleeters believes that if he can find more launchers and warheads, he will be able to provide, for the first time, sufficient evidence that the Islamic State is using US-supplied high-powered munitions in combat against the Iraqi army and its US special forces partners. ISIS itself could hardly make such modern ammunition. This would mean that he had new and very serious opportunities and aspirations. These circumstances also provide an alarming glimpse into the future nature of wars, where any group anywhere can begin home-grown weapons production using materials from the Internet and 3D printing.

Almost all military ammunition, from rifle cartridges to aircraft bombs, regardless of the country of origin, is marked in a certain way. Conventional markings allow one to determine the date of manufacture, the manufacturing plant, the type of explosive used as a filler, as well as the name of the weapon, which is called nomenclature. For Spleeters, this marking is a document “that cannot be falsified.” Stamped impressions on hardened steel are very difficult to remove or alter. “If it says that the ammunition is from such and such a country, it is 99% true,” he says. - And if not, then you can still determine that it is a fake. And this is something completely different. Every detail matters."

It was a love affair that began when Spleeters was a newly minted reporter working for a newspaper in his native Belgium. “There was a war going on in Libya at the time,” he says of the 2011 civil war. He really wanted to understand how Belgian-made rifles got to the rebels who fought against Gaddafi. He believed that if this connection were revealed, the Belgian public would become interested in this conflict, to which they had not shown any attention.

Spleeters began scouring Belgian diplomatic correspondence for more information about secret government deals, but this yielded little. He decided that the only way to get to the bottom of what was happening was to go to Libya himself and personally trace the path of these rifles. He bought a plane ticket using the money from the grant he received and got to work. “You know, it was a little strange,” he says. “I took a vacation to go to Libya.”

Spleeters found the rifles he was looking for. He also discovered that this kind of search gave him much more satisfaction than reading materials about these weapons on the Internet. “There’s a lot to write about guns,” he said. — Weapons loosen people's tongues. It can even make the dead speak.” Spleeters returned to Belgium as a freelance journalist. He has written several articles on the arms trade for French-language newspapers, as well as a couple of reports for think tanks such as the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey. However, the life of a freelancer turned out to be very unstable, and so Spleeters put aside his journalistic pen and in 2014 came to work at Conflict Armament Research as a full-time investigator.

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During one of his first assignments with the organization, to the Syrian city of Kobani, he worked among dead ISIS fighters whose bodies were thrown directly onto the battlefield, where they rotted and decomposed. Spleeters found one AK-47 style rifle with pieces of rotting meat stuck in the curves and recesses of the fore-end and wooden handle. Everywhere there was a sweetish smell of decay and decay. Among the corpses, he also found 7.62 mm cartridges, PKM machine guns and ammunition for the RPG-7 grenade launcher. Some of these weapons were stolen from the Iraqi army. These finds convinced him of the enormous value of field work. He says the information he has cannot be obtained by following news and videos online. “On all this social media, when I see ammunition or small arms from a distance, sometimes it can be like, ‘Yeah, that’s an M16.’ But if you look up close, it’s clear that it’s a Chinese CQ-556 rifle, which is a copy of the M16. But to understand it, you have to look closely,” he tells me, adding that the camera hides much more than it shows. And if you look at the weapon in person, it may turn out that it is from a different manufacturer, and thus has a different origin. You wouldn't guess that from watching a grainy YouTube video.

The war between ISIS and Iraqi government forces is a series of intense battles fought on the streets of cities from house to house. In late 2016, as government troops battled ISIS for the northern city of Mosul, Iraqis discovered that the Islamic State was producing high-caliber ammunition in clandestine factories throughout the area. To study these ammunition factories in Mosul, Spleeters went there while the fighting was still going on there. One day, while Spleeters was photographing a weapon amid the sound of flying bullets, he saw the Iraqi bodyguard who was supposed to be guarding him trying to cut off the head of a dead ISIS fighter with a butcher knife. The blade of the knife was dull, and the soldier was upset. Finally, he walked away from the corpse.

Spliters brought back some important information from Mosul. But coalition airstrikes destroyed much of the city, and by the time government forces declared victory in July, much of the evidence had already been destroyed or lost. As ISIS began to lose ground in Iraq, Spleeters became concerned that the group's weapons production system might be destroyed before he or anyone else could document its full potential. He needed to get to these factories before they were destroyed. Only then could he describe their contents, understand their origins and identify supply chains.

“I am not Kurdi. You are not America,” he said. We were silent at the checkpoint and they let us through.

We arrived in Tal Afar on a hot evening. We made our first stop at a fenced area where, according to Al-Hakim, a mosque could be located. There, at the entrance, lay several shells for a bomb launcher. At first glance, they have a very simple design and are similar to standard American and Soviet mortar ammunition. But if the mines have standard calibers (60mm, 81mm, 82mm, 120mm, etc.), then these shells are 119.5mm in caliber to match the internal diameter of the steel pipes that ISIS uses as a launcher. This difference may seem like a small thing, but the projectile must fit very tightly into the launch tube so that there is sufficient pressure of the powder gases to eject it. ISIS has very strict tolerances and quality requirements, sometimes down to tenths of a millimeter.

At the back of the building were several tanks connected by a steel pipe, as well as large barrels of black liquid. Something was dripping from one tank and some disgusting growths had formed on it. “Do you think it’s rust?” Spliters asks Al-Hakim. It is clear that the liquid is toxic. It looks like the vomit of a drunk who threw up on his shirt. But Spleeters cannot take samples and do tests. He has no laboratory instruments, no protective suit, no gas mask.

“It stings my eyes,” says Al-Hakim. There is a pungent, irritating smell in the yard, as if paint had just been spilled there. Nearby are bags of caustic soda for disinfection.

Spleeters immediately understands what kind of place this is. This is not a warehouse, such as he has seen and photographed in large quantities. This is a production workshop.

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However, night falls on Tal Afar, and there is no electricity in the city. This means that Spleeters will no longer be able to study his treasures and photograph samples in natural light. Soon our convoy returns to an Iraqi military base located near the destroyed city airport. It is a small outpost of refurbished trailers, half of which are riddled with bullet holes. In the trailer next to us, two detained militants who are suspected of belonging to ISIS are sleeping. This is a young man and an older man. They appear to be the only ones captured during the Battle of Tal Afar. Spleeters spends the evening impatiently watching satellite television. During all the time we spent together, he did almost nothing except work and eat, and slept only a few hours.

It dawned quite early, and when the soldiers woke up, Spleeters returned, accompanied by a convoy, to the workshop. He pulls out 20 yellow crime scene stickers, one for each table. He then draws a diagram to later reconstruct the configuration of the room. In one place in this diagram it denotes welding electrodes, in another a grinding machine. “No, this is not a continuous process,” he thinks out loud. “Most likely, these are different work areas for making different things.”

“I told them,” Al-Hakim replies.

“They can do whatever they want when I’m done,” Spleeters says wearily.

In a small room adjacent to the launch tube manufacturing area, Spleeters begins studying dozens of grenades of various models for grenade launchers. Some of them were made many years ago, and each has some kind of identification mark. On Bulgarian-made grenades, the number “10” or “11” is indicated in a double circle. The green dye used by China and Russia varies slightly in shade. “In Iraq, we are at war with the whole world,” one soldier had boasted to me two days earlier, referring to the many foreign fighters recruited by ISIS. But exactly the same impression arises when you look at weapons from a variety of countries, concentrated in one room.

Spleeters carefully examines the warheads of the rockets stacked in rows, and finally finds what he needs. “Habibi, I found a PG-9 shell,” he exclaims, looking towards Al-Hakim. This is a Romanian rocket with batch number 12-14-451. Spleeters has been looking for this exact serial number for the past year. In October 2014, Romania sold the US military 9,252 PG-9 grenades with lot number 12-14-451 for grenade launchers. By purchasing this ammunition, the United States signed an end-user certificate. This is a document confirming that this ammunition will be used only in the American army and will not be transferred to anyone. The Romanian government confirmed the sale by providing CAR with an end-user certificate and proof of delivery of the goods.

So how did American weapons end up in the hands of ISIS? Spleeters can't say for sure yet. On July 19, 2017, the newspaper reported that U.S. officials had been secretly training and arming Syrian rebels from 2013 until mid-2017, when the Trump administration ended the training program, in part out of concern that U.S. weapons might end up in the wrong hands. The US government has not responded to multiple requests for comment on how the weapons ended up in the hands of Syrian rebels and an ISIS munitions factory. The government has also refused to say whether the United States has violated the terms of its end-user certificate and, by extension, whether it is complying with the terms of the U.N. Arms Trade Treaty, which it is a signatory to along with 130 other countries.

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It appears that other countries are also buying and reselling weapons. CAR traced how Saudi Arabia purchased various types of weapons, which were later found in ISIS militant groups. In one case, Spleeters checked the flight plan of a plane that was supposed to deliver 12 tons of ammunition to Saudi Arabia. Documents show that this plane did not land in Saudi Arabia, but flew to Jordan. Sharing a border with Syria, Jordan is a well-known point of transfer of weapons to rebels fighting the Assad regime. Although the Saudis could have claimed that the weapons were stolen or captured, they did not. The people in charge of the flight insist that the plane with the weapons landed in Saudi Arabia, although flight documents refute this. The Saudi government did not respond to requests for comment on how its weapons ended up in the hands of ISIS.

Most of the new generation of terrorism and future war scenarios involve the use of artificial intelligence, unmanned aerial vehicles and self-propelled vehicles with explosives. But this is only part of the story, reflecting the fears of American engineers about the many possibilities for using new technologies. The other, much more dangerous part of the story concerns ISIS technicians. These people have already shown that they can produce weapons that are not inferior to those made by the military industry of states. And over time, it will be even easier for them to set up the production process, since 3D printing is becoming widespread around the world. Michigan Technological University mechanical engineering professor Joshua Pearce is an expert on open source hardware, and he says ISIS's manufacturing process has "very insidious features." In the future, schematic drawings of weapons can be downloaded from secret sites on the Internet, or received through popular social networks with encoding, such as WhatsApp. These files can then be loaded into metal 3D printers, which have come into widespread use in recent years and cost less than a million dollars, including setup. Thus, weapons can be made by simply pressing a button.

“Making weapons using layer-by-layer printing technology is much easier than it seems,” says Art Of Future Word project director August Cole, who works at the Atlantic Council. The rate at which ISIS's intellectual capital spreads depends on the number of young engineers joining its affiliates. At least 48% of jihadist recruits from non-Western countries attended college, and almost half of them studied engineering, according to Oxford University researchers. Of the 25 people involved in the September 11 attacks, at least 13 were college students, and eight were engineers. Among them are the two main organizers of the attacks, Mohammed Atta and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Mohammed received a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of North Carolina. reported that while he was in an American prison, he received permission to create a vacuum cleaner from scratch. Is this a pointless hobby, as the CIA claims, or the hallmark of an inventor? Mohammed downloaded the drawings of the vacuum cleaner from the Internet.

Spleeters had only two days to study the munitions factories in Tal Afar. On the last evening he was in a hurry, trying to get as much work done as possible. ISIS uses distributed production methods. Each section specializes in a specific task, like a car factory. And Spleeters tried to describe and document all these sites and jobs. “We only have one hour left,” he said, looking at the sun as it inexorably sank towards the horizon. At the first plant, Spleeters found a huge smelting furnace, around which lay raw materials waiting their turn to be melted down: engine units, scrap metal, heaps of copper wire. There were also vices with molds for fuses, and next to them lay the empennage for mortar shells. All this was awaiting its turn for assembly in the next workshop. This work was carried out on the ground floor of a three-story building that was once a market. The stove was also installed on the lower level, because it gave off incredible heat. The entire city of Tal Afar was turned into a production base.

Spleeters quickly finishes collecting evidence. “Is there anything left?” he asks an Iraqi Army major. “Yes, there is,” the major replies, approaching the next door. There is a large stove in the lobby that ISIS fighters covered with their handprints by dipping them in paint. It looked like a first-grader's picture of a child. In the corridors lay clay molds for the mass production of 119.5 mm shells. In the next courtyard there is something like a research laboratory. There is ammunition everywhere, new and old, lighting shells, and cutaway models. The tables are littered with dismantled fuses and huge 220mm ammunition. This is the largest caliber created by ISIS engineers. In addition, there were large pipes used as launchers. They were the size of a telephone pole.

Brian Kastner is an author, former Air Force officer, and Iraq War veteran who worked in explosive ordnance disposal.

InoSMI materials contain assessments exclusively of foreign media and do not reflect the position of the InoSMI editorial staff.

Today, the combat units of the extremist group IS (banned in a number of countries around the world, including Russia) use different types of weapons. A wider range of weapons, ammunition and military equipment can hardly be found in any army. Often, the same unit of the Islamic State uses weapons of different calibers, produced in different countries, which can create inconvenience when conducting combat operations and replenishing ammunition. Nevertheless, Islamists continue to attack.

Kalash and M16 in one company

During the fighting, IS militants captured many warehouses of the government armed forces of Syria and Iraq.

This happened during the 2014 military campaign.

Assad's army then used Soviet, Chinese and, to a much lesser extent, Yugoslav-made weapons. Iraqi soldiers after the overthrow American troops Saddam Hussein's regime received weapons made in the USA. Thus, in one Islamic State battle group there may be fighters armed with a Soviet or Chinese AKM, an American M16 rifle or a Belgian FN-FAL.

also in different time from various sources it came to the militants a small amount of Czech-made Scorpion submachine guns, German Heckler & Koch MP5 and Israeli Uzi. In some photographs, IS fighters are armed with even exotic species small arms- for example, a Mosin-Nagant rifle with an optical sight.

A similar “hodgepodge” can be observed in the artillery and armored vehicles of the Islamists. On the one hand, they have Soviet T-55 and T-62 captured from the Syrian military, as well as at least 20 BMP-1 combat vehicles. On the other hand, during the summer 2014 campaign, the Islamic State was able to obtain many samples of American military equipment as trophies. This includes about 20 American Abrams tanks, more than 40 M1117 armored personnel carriers and more than 2,300 HMMWV armored vehicles (or the legendary Humvees, as they are often called). The loss of the latter in large numbers in 2014 was acknowledged by the Prime Minister of Iraq. According to him, these cars were captured by IS during the assault on Mosul. Militants captured several samples of American weapons systems during battles with fighters of the so-called moderate Syrian opposition - the “Syrian Free Army” (), which was supplied with weapons by the United States.

Syrian sources claim that the Islamic State fighters received at least three MiG-21 fighters of the Syrian Air Force, about six Iranian Muhajer-6 drones and several Mi-8 helicopters as trophies. Representatives of the Syrian military command claim that the army shot down at least two Islamists and at least three UAVs during the fighting near Kobani.

Boris Chikin, an armament expert at the Russian private military company Moran Security Group, believes that the presence of weapons of different calibers in military formations is gradually ceasing to be a problem. According to him, the situation with the variety of weapons dates back to the 1930s, when small arms manufacturers in different countries created cartridges of different calibers.

“This was done on purpose: if a war breaks out and the enemy manages to capture a certain number of guns that are in service with your army, he has no chance of using the weapon against you for a long time. But now the Americans are producing cartridges for our samples, and we are doing the same thing. Moreover, they make our RPG-7 grenade launchers under a different name. So if the manufacturer did not sell you ammunition for a certain type of weapon, you can try to buy it in another state,” Chikin said in an interview with Gazeta.Ru.

A military expert, writer, and veteran of combat operations in Yugoslavia believes that the diversity of ammunition calibers is a problem, but it is currently being solved in IS through captured warehouses with shells and mines of a certain type. He gave an example from his time of service in Yugoslavia (1993-1995). According to him, in those days artillery systems of both Soviet and NATO standards were used - 105, 122, 130, 152, 155 mm.

“When I was there, the ammunition problem was being solved using supplies from warehouses created during socialist Yugoslavia. I believe that the situation is the same here: apparently, IS captured quite a lot of warehouses with shells from the Iraqi and Syrian armies. Often this is ammunition for Soviet guns, howitzers and mortars,” the expert told Gazeta.Ru.

According to him, ammunition for artillery systems fighting in Syria can also be purchased abroad, supplied to the Islamic State through Turkey.

“I can only guess, but there was information about supplies of a certain amount of foreign ammunition to ISIS through other countries. It is possible that they were purchased somewhere in Eastern Europe and supplied to ISIS,” Polikarpov noted.

“In addition, the intensity of the fighting there now is not very high - and the consumption of shells is not so high,” he said, noting that this is also confirmed by footage from the liberated air base of the Syrian government forces of Kuweiris.

“It can be seen that the battles for it were fierce, but the sides used mainly small arms and anti-aircraft guns. There are no visible traces of heavy artillery shells,” the expert said.

Union of French and Uzbeks

Another problem for the Islamic State's combat units is the presence of a large number of fighters from around the world. At the beginning of December, the international expert and analytical organization The Soufan Group released a report containing detailed data on ethnic composition militant group.

The document states that currently from 27 thousand to 31 thousand foreigners who came from 86 countries of the world are fighting on the side of IS. This report also reports that the number of citizens of Western European countries fighting on the side of IS has doubled, and citizens of Russia and Central Asia have tripled.

Citing official sources, The Soufan Group reports that 2,400 Russians are fighting in the ranks of IS (this data was recently confirmed by IG), 300 Kazakhs and 386 citizens of Tajikistan.

According to unofficial sources of the research center, in the ranks of the extremist group there are 500 citizens of Uzbekistan, 500 citizens of Kyrgyzstan and 360 citizens of Turkmenistan. Total number citizens from the CIS countries fighting in the ranks of Islamists amount to 4.7 thousand people.

According to the report, the largest group of foreigners in IS came from Tunisia (7 thousand people), Jordan (2.5 thousand people), Saudi Arabia (2.5 thousand people), Russia (mainly from Chechnya and Dagestan - 2 ,4 thousand people), Turkey (2-2.2 thousand people), Morocco (1.5 thousand people) and Egypt (1 thousand people). IS also includes citizens of New Zealand, Qatar and Portugal. In addition, the document states that the group includes about 5 thousand militants from Western European countries - mostly from France, Great Britain and Germany.

At the final board meeting of the Russian Ministry of Defense on December 11, 2015, the head of the department said that the zones of influence of the “Islamic State” are expanding. “The militants have captured about 70% of the territory of Syria and most areas of Iraq. The number of terrorists is more than 60 thousand people,” Shoigu said, emphasizing that there is “a threat of transferring their actions to Central Asia and the Caucasus.”

Military expert Mikhail Polikarpov believes that it is quite difficult for the extremist command to solve the problem of the presence in IS units of a large number of militants from other countries whose residents do not speak Arabic. “Firstly, each such unit may have an Arab translator. Secondly, most likely, there are units there that are organized along ethnic lines. For example, an Uzbek company as part of an Arab battalion. And I do not rule out that many of these Mujahideen use broken Russian as a working language,” Polikarpov said.

American missiles pass through Turkey

There is information from various media sources that in addition to trophies, IS also receives weapons purchased specifically for this organization.

According to the head of the department of Eurasian integration and development of the SCO at the Institute of CIS Countries, Vladimir Evseev, foreign weapons for the Islamic State are purchased by Saudi Arabia, and they are transported to militants in Syria from Turkey.

“They are purchasing not only small arms, but also American TOW anti-tank missile systems.

Recently, the explosion of one of these missiles injured journalists from Russia. In addition, there was information about the supply of portable anti-aircraft guns from Libya. missile systems. Most likely, they were previously stolen from the warehouses of Gaddafi’s army; these are Soviet-made weapons,” the specialist said.

Evseev noted that weapons are supplied from Turkey to Syria along two main routes, both of which are located in the province of Aleppo. He believes that if the international coalition aircraft subject these routes to more intense bombing, this will seriously complicate the IS's ability to obtain various types of weapons and ammunition. “Of course, they will transfer something to Syria via secret routes in small batches, but the volume of weapons and components for military equipment the Islamists receive will be significantly reduced,” the expert said.

According to him, the Syrian special services, which have their own agents among the Islamic State, can provide serious assistance in identifying IS warehouses and transport routes. “However, IS has serious counterintelligence, which complicates the creation of an intelligence apparatus within the Islamic State. In this counterintelligence they serve former officers Saddam Hussein’s special services, and they are quite good specialists in their field,” summed up Evseev.

According to the expert, IS members produce some of the cartridges and ammunition themselves at enterprises that they managed to seize in Syria and Iraq. This applies, in particular, to cartridges for certain types of small arms. In addition, many videos dedicated to the actions of the Islamic State show how militants of this organization use homemade systems volley fire and homemade mortars.

Until recently, militants of the Islamic State actively pursued an occupation policy to capture large territories of Iraq and Syria. One of the secrets of success was the arming of terrorists.

Light weapons.

The human rights organization Amnesty International published a report according to which Islamic State militants have a huge amount of weapons. It has been flowing uncontrollably into the Middle East for decades, mainly from the United States and its allies. According to human rights activists of the international organization Amnesty International, weapons supplied even to “moderate” groups can easily change owners and end up in the hands of extremists. Terrorists use more than 100 types of weapons, originating from approximately 25 countries.

Most of the modern weapons and ammunition for them (as a result of large-scale US deliveries), including armored vehicles of various classes, were captured by militants from the Iraqi army, which was retreating from Mosul, where military warehouses were located. “The variety of weaponry used by the group demonstrates how reckless arms trafficking fuels large-scale violence,” researcher Patrick Wilken said in the report.

Consider a report from Conflict Armament Research (CAR).

According to the organization, during the conflict in Iraq and Syria, bullets and cartridges produced in the United States were repeatedly found on the battlefield. More specifically, among the 1,700 gun casings examined from cartridges used by jihadists, more than 20% were American-made. Another interesting fact is the discovery of cartridge cases produced in Iran, China, the USSR and a number of other countries of the former communist camp, manufactured since 1945. The bulk of this ammunition was collected in Iraq and northern Syria (Gatash, Khaira).

Also, experts found a number of special finds. The first of them is the M-79 Osa hand-held anti-tank grenade launcher made in Yugoslavia. It can fire 90mm rockets.

M79 "Wasp"

Experts claim that it was these grenade launchers that Saudi Arabia supplied to the opposition members of the Free Syrian Army in 2013. Thus, once again there is a connection between the ruling Saudi dynasty and the militants of the Islamic State (officially condemned by the Saudi government). The next example is an assault rifle manufactured by Colt Defense and FN Manufacturing, which is in service with the United States Army. We are talking about the Colt M16A4 rifle (one of the latest modifications). Another type of American weapon captured from jihadists is the XM15 E2S semi-automatic rifle - essentially the same M16, but its “civilian version,” so to speak, manufactured by Bushmaster. According to researchers, both rifles were captured by Islamic State terrorists from military warehouses of the Iraqi army.

Bushmaster XM15-E2S

It is worth noting that one of the main and massive view The militants' weapon is a 7.62 mm Kalashnikov assault rifle. Specifically, samples from 1960, 1964 and 1970 were seized.

Speaking about high-precision weapons, it is worth mentioning the Croatian sniper rifle Elmech EM992. It was created on the basis of a German repeating carbine developed in 1935, the Mauser 98k, which was still in service in parts of the Third Reich. Another sniper rifle discovered by the militants was the Chinese Type 79 7.62 mm caliber. This specimen is an exact copy of a sniper SVD rifles, which was produced in the USSR.

Elmech EM992

Based on the data obtained, the following main sources of weapons for ISIS can be identified:

Syrian army warehouses,
Iraqi army warehouses,
weapons captured in battle
acquired in the process of active foreign trade.

Heavy armored vehicles, artillery.

Speaking about the presence of armored vehicles and artillery systems among ISIS militants, it is worth mentioning the words of Iraqi Prime Minister Al-Abadi about the capture of 2,300 off-road armored vehicles with heavy weapons during the battles near Mosul in 2015. small arms HUMVEE made in USA.

An American soldier in the machine gun compartment of an armored vehicle HUMVEE

The Pentagon, in turn, provided disappointing data on the availability, until recently, of more than a hundred American Abrams M1A1 main battle tanks in the hands of militants. Although supporters of the “conspiracy theory” claim that there was only a veiled transfer of technology to the so-called. “moderate opposition” to counter the “Assad regime” in Syria.

M1A1 Abrams

According to various sources, the army of the “caliphate” at the peak of its power had 140 Abrams tanks of the M1A1 modification. Almost all of them were captured in ambushes on Iraqi troops in Anbar province. This generation of tanks has been produced since 1984 and is equipped with a 120-mm smoothbore cannon, forty rounds of ammunition, reinforced frontal armor and a comprehensive system for protecting the crew from weapons mass destruction with the possibility of air conditioning. The cost of such a tank is about $4.3 million per unit.

As a result of the large-scale retreat of the Iraqi Army, the city of Ramadi with a population of 850 thousand people and hundreds of pieces of heavy equipment, including artillery, passed into the hands of terrorists. According to preliminary estimates, 52 M198 Howitzer artillery towed howitzers costing $0.5 million each, made in the USA. Systems developed in the 1970s, produced in an amount of about 1,700 units, are still in service with the armies of the USA, Saudi Arabia, Australia, Bahrain, Honduras, Greece, Lebanon, India, Pakistan, Tunisia, Ecuador, Thailand.

American troops fire from an M198 Howitzer

Do not forget that in addition to American military equipment, ISIS was armed with a large amount of such production Soviet Union, namely: T-55 – medium tank the sixties and seventies of the last century, which essentially served as the progenitor of the main battle tanks, the T-62 is also a Soviet medium tank, a continuation and modification of the T-55 vehicles, and light armored vehicles BMP and BRDM. The most modern example in this series was Russian tank T-90 captured from government forces more than six months ago. The militants got the vehicle fully combat-ready, resold it several times and eventually “surfaced” in battles in the province of Hama, however, its appearance will not play a particular turning point, due to the availability of modern anti-tank weapons in the SAA.

T-90 tank captured by terrorists

Also, a number of sources indicate that militants have BM-21 multiple launch rocket systems (MLRS) and operational-tactical missile systems (OTRK) SCAD of the Iraqi Army, built on the basis of Soviet R-17 ballistic missiles. However, the technology, which is extremely difficult to master, requires highly trained specialists, and a number of other factors invisible to the average person, led to the fact that not a single SCAD rocket took off.

Iraqi militants have a Scud missile

Light armored vehicles. Motorized infantry.

Combat tactics in Iraq and Syria require highly mobile units, which have become combat units based on pickup trucks. Today, armed pickup trucks can be found wherever there is fighting: in South American countries, where guerrillas fight the government, drug dealers fight the law, and the police fight gangs - there are special forces there law enforcement use pickup trucks for their own purposes. In Iraq, a machine gun mounted on a police car is the norm, although larger caliber, all the better. In Afghanistan, combat pickup trucks are called “technicals,” and not only terrorists, but most special forces of the NATO contingent travel on them. Exactly the same situation is now developing in the territories of Syria and Iraq, where pickup trucks with mounted heavy machine guns are used by all parties to the conflict, including the Russian Special Operations Forces.

Among the many models of pickup trucks, the Toyota Hilux is the most popular among militants today. The US military compares this pickup truck in terms of reliability with a Kalashnikov assault rifle.

Syrian army vehicles. Photo: twitter.com/MathieuMorant

The main armament of such vehicles on the IS side was the DShKM heavy machine gun (or its Chinese analogue “Type 54”). It is a modernized machine gun of Degtyarev and Shpagin. Despite the fact that this type of weapon was adopted by the Red Army back in 1938, it still represents a formidable force today due to its high efficiency in firing at armored targets and its rate of fire.

The second most popular installation on pickup trucks is the 14.5 mm Vladimirov heavy machine gun (KPVT), which poses a serious threat to light armored vehicles and aircraft. Often machine guns are simply removed from damaged armored vehicles, handles are welded to them, and a sight is installed. In addition, a significant part of the “technicals” are equipped with launchers of unguided rockets. Basically, helicopter blocks installed on homemade machines are used in this role. But there are also absolutely homemade designs that lack sights and missile stabilization, which makes such weapons ineffective.

It is worth noting that there are also pickup trucks equipped with truly formidable artillery weapons - 107 mm reactive system multiple rocket launcher "Type 63", made in China and quadruple launcher Egyptian-made 122mm SACR missiles. However, firing from them often poses a threat to the terrorists themselves: a car carelessly left on the rise threatens to tip over and shoot itself, and the rocket’s jet stream can cause the car to catch fire or the ammunition in the back of the car to detonate. ISIS terrorists use American 106-mm M40 recoilless rifles as direct fire support weapons.

However, faced with the realities of combat in the city, the “teknikals” began to be heavily armored. They additionally began to be equipped with armor plates in the front part of the vehicle, and homemade shields for the machine gunner in the back. For these purposes, hatches from infantry fighting vehicles were often used.

The logic behind the choice of pickup trucks by the military is clear and is explained by the fact that they have a number of advantages:

– capacity: a ton of cargo or up to 20 fighters with weapons, which is inaccessible to a regular jeep.

– in case of sudden shelling, the vehicle can be easily abandoned;

– speed of movement and striking,

– the ability to install powerful weapons directly into the body, thus compensating for the lack of armored vehicles and aviation and artillery support.

Aviation

In the first year of the war in Syria and Iraq, caliphate militants captured a number of American UH60 Black Hawk helicopters and Soviet-made MiG-21 and MiG-23 fighters. However, the complete air supremacy of Russian and NATO aircraft, the establishment over the Khmeimim and Tartus bases using anti-aircraft missile systems () and Pantsir-S1, did not allow these “trophies” to rise into the sky. Most of them were destroyed by government forces while still on the ground.

At the same time, militants are actively using unmanned aerial vehicles based on commercial models of quadcopters and hexacopters. They tune them with video cameras high resolution, reinforced with batteries and mortar shells, hanging them on a UAV and dropping them over the positions of regular troops in Iraq and Syria.

https://youtu.be/tuEZJ3n2I-w

Air defense

IS militants often use air defense systems heavy machine guns and man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS). At destroyed government bases, terrorists were able to capture a small amount American complexes"Stinger". ISIS is also armed with Russian MANPADS “Strela”, “Igla” and their foreign “replicas”. Using these systems, they managed to shoot down several government helicopters.

Militants armed with Stinger MANPADS (USA) in the back of a pickup truck

Anti-tank systems

RPG-7 grenade launchers have become the main anti-tank weapons for soldiers of the self-proclaimed caliphate - they are cheap and easy to use. Among the captured weapons were a number of Konkurs and Fagot anti-tank guided systems and Chinese HJ-8 ATGMs capable of hitting targets at distances of up to three kilometers. The most modern anti-tank system, which militants use, including against helicopters at low altitudes or hovering, is the American TOW, supplied by the US so-called. "moderate opposition" in Syria. They account for the main losses of government armored vehicles and the bulk of the “media” campaign of IS militants.

Mortars

Since the end of 2013, ISIS has begun mass production and use of homemade Hellfire mortars. They are homemade howitzers, the shells for which are household gas cylinders filled with an enhanced ammonium nitrate charge and destructive elements to increase the number of victims. As a means of ensuring explosions, a homemade fuse or a standard fuse is equipped artillery ammunition. Such a “projectile” can be equipped with a chemical agent (there are proven cases of militants using mustard gas and mustard gas). The shooting accuracy of such weapons is quite low, but the destructive power is very high.

An IS terrorist loads a homemade projectile into a homemade mortar

Ballistics calculation using a tablet

Analyzing images from social networks and publicly available information on the Internet, it is clear that militants use Apple iPad tablets with publicly accessible software MBC (Mortar Ballistic Calculator), which allows you to calculate the trajectory of mortar shells. By purchasing the application for little money and having data about the wind, distance to the target, etc. From the appropriate devices, easily available in online stores, IS militants can fire standard mortars with the required accuracy.

To summarize, it is worth saying that the weapons and military equipment militants are by no means limited to the above. Due to the lack of standard and centrally supplied weapons, terrorists have to replace them with a motley mass of handicraft weapons and modified, converted, restored samples (such as the T-34 tank from the Great Patriotic War, which can be fired remotely using a cord as if it were a gun) .