By C. J. CHIVERS
There are many indicators of the stubborn determination and evolving organization of the fighting groups in Syria seeking to unseat President Bashar al-Assad. One of them is this: the development of local arms-producing industries in Syrian cities and the countryside. In a war in which the antigovernment fighters have sought outside support and been disappointed by what has been offered, especially from the West, the society that produced the fighters has also undertaken the production of matériel for guerrilla war, a social project of such a scale that it has contributed to the armed opposition's momentum and confidence this year. The progression is both intriguing and rel evant to those seeking to understand the Free Syrian Army, as the loosely organized antigovernment fighters are called. This is not just for the view that local production provides of latter-day warfare with do-it-yourself arms. It offers insights into something else - the social forces within an uprising that is reordering the Middle East.
At War will highlight samples of the work of arms-producing tradesmen in Tal Rifaat, a small city on the agricultural plain north of Aleppo, doing so both in the interest of illuminating the origins and choices of makeshift weapons and to underline the meaning, promises and risks inherent in a such a collective project. I gained access to several tradesmen and different categories of weapons. Beginning today, At War will examine the industry's evolution and look at two locally made items, and will continue in the next installment with more weapons and a set of conclusions about what they mean.
At first, the rebels' improvised weapons assumed forms well established in the Middle East: Molotov cocktails and roadside bombs. These weapons were seen as the government crackdown intensified last year, but initially had little effect against the Syrian Army and security forces. With time these two types of homegrown weapons served to punish the Syrian armored columns that for months had roamed the roads unchallenged; by this spring, the rebels' roadside bombs had become so prevalent and effective that they had forced the Syrian Army to all but cease operating in entire stretches of its own country, especially along the country's northern border. These weapons changed the nature and direction of the war.
As bombs made the roads impassable (or at least not passable without a draining and grisly price), the Syrian military recalibrated tactically, sending helicopters and eventually jets to attack where its ground troops no longer ventured. As the government escalated, the rebels and their supporters were not idle. They were busy expanding their arms-shop handiwork. A few writers have taken note. Eliot Higgins, the man behind the busy Brown Moses Blog, wrote an early summary on Foreign Policy magazine's Web site, in which he identified trends (including the appearance of gun trucks) and a few unusual items (like a locally made flame-thrower) and noted, accurately, that until that point “DIY weapons have been less of a feature in Syria than in the Libyan civil war.â€
At War and The New York Times covered closely the arms manufacturing associated with Libya's uprising. While it is indisputably true that antigovernment fighters in Libya were faster and more prolific in rolling out gun trucks and garage-grade rocket launchers, this was partly the case because these fighters, aided by NATO air cover, held ground and captured heavy machine guns and ground-to-ground rockets sooner in their war, and were able to organize workshops to repurpose captured weapons with less risk. There is another factor, too: In Syria, the workshops and the men behind them spent much of their early time learning a lethal craft that Libyans pursued at a comparatively tiny scale: bomb-making. By this summer, the Syrian trade in brewing crude explosives and wiring circuits that can be detonated remotely had matured into something formidable. Design energy and labor were freed for other work. Mr. Higgins was looking in the right place - toward the development of more workshop-made arms.
Late last month, The Times made a first effort to describe several means by which Syrian fighting groups are obtaining arms, including via smuggling and organic manufacture. This complemented a previous look at pricing for standard infantry arms, which helped explain why the underground manufacturing effort had taken root: steep prices for weapons, and intense demand, drove a hunt to find as many sources as possible.
Space limits prevented us from sharing many details. (The picture desk did manage to post an excellent slide show.) This pair of posts will examine more closely four types of weapons. These include a mounted 14.5-millimeter machine gun, a small towed howitzer made entirely by local metalworkers, a homemade mortar and an assortment of ground-to-ground rockets.
The machine-gun mount appeared to borrow heavily from two non-martial implements in common local use â€" a satellite-dish stand and a disc brake for a motorcycle - to field a captured weapon in an useful way. The other three systems, just like the rebels' roadside and truck bombs, were manufactured almost entirely from scratch, with only a few components from traditional munitions or explosives plants.
To Mount a Machine Gun: Borrow From What's Nearby
Begin by looking at the photograph above. It shows a scene common to many recent wars: a pickup truck in service as a mobile machine-gun platform, with the machine gunner (in this case, standing within a pair of black Chuckie-T high-tops) in back, behind a 14.5-millimeter machine gun on a makeshift mount. That man is a defector from the Syrian Army, in which he worked with, among other things, machine guns. All normal so far. Now look more closely. The machine-gun mount has unusual features, evident below.
Is that a bicycle handle with handbrakes attached to the weapon's back end, with cables reaching to the brake? Almost. It's actually a disc brake for a motorcycle, with hand levers for applying the pads to the disc. As adaptations go, this one is both novel and makes good sense. Why would a machine gun need a motorcycle brake, especially when carried around the countryside on a pickup truck that has brakes of its own? The answer has nothing to do with slowing a vehicle's movement. Used in the manner shown above, the repurposed brake serves to control and ultimately arrest the vertical motion of the machine gun, allowing the operator to release the handbrake to adjust the weapon's elevation and then, when on target, to squeeze the brake and hold the weapon steady for firing. Below is a better view of the pads and disc.
Now look back at the base of the machine gun, at the round metal endplate. Midway between the handgrips, on the top of the machine gun, you will spot an L-shaped metal strip. At the top of that strip, below, you'll see someone has drilled a small hole into its top. That hole is threaded. We've highlighted it in red to help it stand out.
What is its purpose? Only in the digital age would you guess it. The hole has been tapped to receive a standard tripod mount for a digital camera, affixed so that the lens points down the barrel's length. Thus installed, the camera is then put on video mode, and the lens zoomed out to the horizon. The camera's LCD screen then serves as a long-range sight - a live video feed allowing the man firing the weapon to observe the path of the tracers relative to an aircraft or distant vehicle much more closely than he otherwise would.
The mount has other features as well â€" including a sheet-metal feed box on its left side, to hold the weapon's belted ammunition. But the tubular pedestal is more interesting. For a long time, many of us had wondered how rebels in recent wars had so quickly designed such pedestals, especially in forms that appear to work quite well. One possible answer came to mind when Bryan Denton and I were atop a building in Aleppo, watching Syrian Air Force helicopters and an L-39 attack jet during a series of rocket runs. We were crouched low on the roof in a neighborhood where many buildings were covered in thickets of satellite dishes. Each dish was mounted on a metal stand similar to those commonly holding vehicle-mounted machine guns. This same pedestal, we realized, was a high-demand part of the local metalworkers' craft. It is a small step from an adjustable satellite dish mount to a mount in which a shooter can traverse and elevate a machine gun while standing in a pickup bed. This is one possible root of this practice.
So how does the entire mount come together? One afternoon last month, the commander of the unit in current possession of this machine gun, Abdul Hakim Yasin, displayed a video file that clearly showed the rounds from this same machine gun striking a Syrian Air Force Mi-8 or Mi-17 helicopter at long range. These impacts would not have been seen otherwise.
The aircraft survived the shooting, though it fled. On one level, the video of this shooting raised obvious questions about how much more damage has been inflicted in Syria'a air force than is known. On another, the entire apparatus for putting into action a captured machine gun underscores an important point: that the antigovernment fighters' makeshift arms industry has gone well beyond merely making do. It has found ways to marry powerful weapons and locally made or recycled devices, and to field weapons that c an influence a complex fight against a conventionally well-equipped foe.
How this happened will set up a larger point, after we examine the other weapons.
Workshop-Grade Artillery
The next weapon system worth examining was briefly covered in The Times. Dubbed by those who made it as “Dadool,†Syrian slang for an overweight, energetic man, it is a 62-millimeter towed howitzer, shown above.
The weapon itself commands attention, and it was obviously the result of a fairly extended design process. The photograph below shows the discarded remains of one prototype â€" evidence that arms like this are not spontaneous creations. There is an extended process behind them.
The current version of the weapon is loaded through its breech, and fires locally made projectiles though a 65-inch-long barrel. Each projectile is roughly the size of a 16-ounce beverage bottle, and has been packed with locally made explosives. As eye-catching as the howitzer is, these shells are more important. They speak to the broader phenomenon required to field such a system. And that is what this is â€" a full system, a weapon and its associated ammunition, assembled by a collective of tradesmen with different skills.
The shells, several of which are shown above, work by a multistep process. Each is built around two sections of pipe, joined by threaded couplings that match snugly to the interior diameter the howitzer's barrel. Inside each pipe is an explosive fill, ideally an insensitive explosive that can handle jarring and swings in temperature. (Badr, the man who made Dadool, said different explosives had been tried inside the shell; the version as of August was urea-based.)
At the forward end of the projectile, metal workers have designed and affixed a cast aluminum fuze body, which is topped with a hollow threaded bolt with a crude striker assembly. This hollowed-out bolt holds a sensitive explosive, placed to initiate the larg er volume of explosives in the pipe when the projectile makes contact with a solid object after being fired.
Another feature is worth pointing to: Each coupling has been scored by a grinder or similar tool. The resulting grooves are intended to impart spin on the projectile as it travels down the barrel, which is not rifled. The spin is meant to stabilize the projectile in flight, preventing yaw, drift or even tumbling. This design touch suggests that the shells' manufacturers possess a more than rudimentary understanding of ballistics, although whether it actually works is anyone's guess.
Three samples of entire projectiles, absent their striker assemblies, can be seen below, left. At right is the striker.
So how does it all work? To fire these rounds, each projectile is seated on an open-ended metal cylinder that fits within the howitzer's breech. This contains propellant removed from shotgun shells, one by one, to fill the empty space. At the opposing en d of each cylinder, which is closed, workers have drilled a narrow hole into which a .22-caliber blank cartridge, of the sort used in a starter pistol at a track meet, is inserted. This is a clever: a blank cartridge, not typically of use in wartime, serving as a primer for an explosive shell. You can see an example below and to the right, in the image of the blank atop the open-ended pipe that holds the shotgun propellant, and then the same cartridge inserted, below.
Once a shell has been slipped into the breech and the heavy steel plate has been slid into place behind it, rotated a few degrees and bolted down tight, the operator is ready to fire Dadool. This is done by pulling a 20-meter-long lanyard that releases a spring-loaded firing pin. The pin strikes the base of the blank cartridge, which flashes and ignites the propellant. The rest happens in the same split second: the propellant's almost instantaneous burn results in a rapid gas expansion that blasts the pro jectile down and out the barrel, toward to its intended target.
To see the weapon test-fired, watch the following video.
Now, let's talk about limits, because a weapon like this has many. For all of the work that went into developing such a weapon, it is not a system that can be fired quickly. Reload times would run into minutes. And as of last month, Dadool in tests had a short range: perhaps two kilometers, according to the man who made it, Badr. What this means is that in a head-to-head fight against an army unit with a reasonably proficient mortar crew, Dadool and its operators would be vulnerable, the more so when you consider the intensity of the muzzle flash visible in the video.
Another detail is worth pulling out: Badr's decision use a 20-meter-long lanyard. Here an unbendable fact remains: weapons of this sort are part of a very dangerous means of waging war. The length of that lanyard tells you that those who designed this weapon want those who u se it to be far away from the weapon when it is fired. The reasons for such precautions are self-evident. The pipe that forms Dadool's barrel might not be able to withstand the heat or pressure of firing, and could rupture. And this pipe will likely only get weaker over time, in part due to the barrel erosion you'd expect from using plumbing-grade pipe in this way.
The primitive point-detonating fuze in each projectile's nose presents yet another concern. Safety features in workshop-grade weapons can be nonexistent, and the nature of this fuze's design could make it prone to mishap when undergoing the rapid acceleration associated with being fired, the jolt of which could force the striker to slip backward and initiate the explosive train. That could rupture Dadool's barrel, too â€" even more dangerously. A 20-meter-long lanyard is a sound idea. Thirty meters might be even better.
Now that you have a sense of some of the weapons, here comes that bucket of cold wa ter. The most important elements of the production of machine-gun turrets and indirect-fire arms are not the turrets or the improvised artillery. The most important element is the underlying phenomenon and what it suggests about Syria today. At War will take that up in more detail in the next post.
Follow C.J. Chivers on Facebook, on Twitter at @cjchivers or on his personal blog, cjchivers.com, where many posts from At War are supplemented with more photographs and further information.
