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Many M-16s, the conventional wisdom goes, entered Syria after militants seized thousands of them from Iraq’s struggling security forces, which in turn had received the guns — along with armored vehicles, howitzers and warehouses’ worth of other equipment — from the Pentagon before American troops left the country in 2011. The militants’ abrupt possession of former American matériel was part of the battlefield turnabout last summer that led Julian E. Barnes, a Wall Street Journal correspondent, to tweet a proposed name for the Pentagon’s anti-militant bombing campaign: Operation Hey That’s My Humvee. And yet by this year, for all the attention the captured weapons had received, M-16s were seemingly uncommon in Syria. The expected large quantities had eluded researchers.
The investigator urged his host, a local security official, to rush after the Kurd and ask if he would allow the rifle to be photographed and its origins ascertained. Soon the investigator (who works for Conflict Armament Research, a private arms-tracking organization in Britain, and who asked that his name be withheld for safety reasons) found a surprise within his surprise. The rifle, which its current owner said had been captured from the Islamic State last year, was not an M-16. It was a Chinese CQ, an M-16 knockoff that resembles its predecessor but has a starkly different arms-trafficking history.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/27/magazine/where-the-islamic-state-gets-its-weapons.html
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday April 29 2015, @11:27AM
Yes and this is the basically infinite part. Take 1500 million and divide it by the relatively small number of active boots on the ground, even if the crooks in charge embezzle half of it they have a remarkable pile of money for infantry gear.
This is before you get into the sectarian support issues. They're not pirates or mercenaries. They got friends. Friends with oil money.
They're not poor by any stretch of the imagination. Under those conditions it would be surprising if shipping containers from China were NOT falling from the sky.
It would be interesting to compile some kind of list of rebellions by inflation adjusted $ per rebel. They are the wealthiest rebel force I can think of. Usually the rich guys buy their way into power without all this messy beheading stuff, but, hey, if it works they're not gonna fix it.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday April 29 2015, @01:37PM
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday April 29 2015, @03:22PM
Its a bizarre situation. They control the land and population a $400M bank sits on in Mosul, and everyone without an axe to grind sees that as "they got themselves a bank full of cash and gold" yet like two Iraqi officials in an "iraqi information minister" style rant will insist they technically have no money at all and don't look into our branches finances because that would be really bad for me and a couple agitprop pieces in the mass media trying to stir the pot.
True the bank continues to operate and supposedly is physically undamaged. Also true the when the army walks up to a teller and asks for their "tax" payment if the bank doesn't just open the door the bankers probably get the "strap to chair and ignite" treatment that ISIS likes so much.
What can't be debated is there's no logical reason to think they would be hurting for money by any interpretation of mental gymnastics and rationalization and no evidence they're actually hurting for money observationally, and the point being that plenty of revolutions have been great successes without much money anyway. So other than socking money away in Switzerland, they're spending it on food and stuff, so where's the brand new name brand stuff instead of chicom ripoffs?
I mean I've looked into revolutions involving extreme poverty and this ain't it, and I've seen revolutions where they got no friends, and again this ain't it, so where's the shiny? Maybe they're hyper disciplined or something like warriors out of the Dune books traveling the desert on sandworms. Probably not, but ?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday April 29 2015, @09:20PM
What can't be debated is there's no logical reason to think they would be hurting for money by any interpretation of mental gymnastics and rationalization and no evidence they're actually hurting for money observationally, and the point being that plenty of revolutions have been great successes without much money anyway. So other than socking money away in Switzerland, they're spending it on food and stuff, so where's the brand new name brand stuff instead of chicom ripoffs?
Aside from the natural expense of waging war, which is by any measure the most efficient way of squandering wealth man has yet devised.