Libyan missiles looted

[darrels joy]

EXCLUSIVE: Libyan missiles looted

CNN's Ben Wedeman and Ingrid Formanek reporting from Tripoli, Libya -

TRIPOLI, Libya (CNN) - A potent stash of Russian-made surface-to-air missiles is missing from a huge Tripoli weapons warehouse amid reports of weapons looting across war-torn Libya.

They are Grinch SA-24 shoulder-launched missiles, also known as Igla-S missiles, the equivalent of U.S.-made Stinger missiles.

A CNN team and Human Rights Watch found dozens of empty crates marked with packing lists and inventory numbers that identified the items as Igla-S surface-to-air missiles.

The list for one box, for example, written in English and Russian, said it had contained two missiles, with inventory number "Missile 9M342," and a power source, inventory number "Article 9B238."

Grinch SA-24s are designed to target front-line aircraft, helicopters, cruise missiles and drones. They can shoot down a plane flying as high as 11,000 feet and can travel 19,000 feet straight out.

Fighters aligned with the National Transitional Council and others swiped armaments from the storage facility, witnesses told Human Rights Watch.

The warehouse is located near a base of the Khamis Brigade, a special forces unit in Gadhafi's military, in the southeastern part of the capital.

The warehouse contains mortars and artillery rounds, but there are empty crates for those items as well. There are also empty boxes for another surface-to-air missile, the SA-7.

Peter Bouckaert, Human Rights Watch emergencies director, told CNN he has seen the same pattern in armories looted elsewhere in Libya, noting that "in every city we arrive, the first thing to disappear are the surface-to-air missiles."

He said such missiles can fetch many thousands of dollars on the black market.

"We are talking about some 20,000 surface-to-air missiles in all of Libya, and I've seen cars packed with them." he said. "They could turn all of North Africa into a no-fly zone."

There was no immediate comment from NTC officials.

The lack of security at the weapons site raises concerns about stability in post-Gadhafi Libya and whether the new NTC leadership is doing enough to stop the weapons from getting into the wrong hands.

A NATO official, who asked to not be named because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter, said 575 surface-to-air missiles, radar systems and sites or storage facilities were hit by NATO airstrikes and either damaged or destroyed between March 31 and Saturday. He didn't elaborate on the specifics about the targets.

Gen. Carter Ham, chief of U.S. Africa Command, has said he's concerned about the proliferation of weapons, most notably the shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles. He said there were about 20,000 in Libya when the international operation began earlier this year and many of them have not been accounted for.

"That's going to be a concern for some period of time," he said in April.
Gilles de Kerchove, the European Union counterterrorism coordinator, raised concerns Monday about the possibility that al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, based in North Africa, could gain access to small arms, machine guns and surface-to-air missiles.

Western officials worry that weapons from the storage sites will end up in the hands of militants or adversaries like Iran.

The governments of neighboring Niger and Chad have both said that weapons from Libya are already being smuggled into their countries, and they are destined for al Qaeda. They include detonators and a plastic explosive called Semtex. Chad's president said they include SA-7 missiles.

An ethnic Tuareg leader in the northern Niger city of Agadez also said many weapons have come across the border. He said he and other Tuareg leaders are anxious about Gadhafi's Tuareg fighters returning home - with their weapons - and making common cause with al Qaeda cells in the region. Gadhafi's fighting forces have included mercenaries from other African nations.

The missing weapons also conjure fears of what happened in Iraq, where people grabbed scores of weapons when Saddam Hussein's regime was overthrown.

Bouckaert said one or two of the missing artillery rounds are "enough to make a car bomb."

"We should remember what happened in Iraq," he said, when the "country was turned upside down" by insurgents using such weaponry.

There have been similar concerns in Afghanistan, where the United States provided thousands of Stinger missiles to the Afghan mujahedeen when they were fighting the Soviets in the 1980s. The United States has spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to buy them back, fearful that they would fall into the hands of terrorists.

CNN's Emily Smith, Tim Lister, Joe Sterling and Larry Shaughnessy contributed to this report

http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2011/0...ssiles-looted/

[darrels joy]

Wonderful: 20,000 surface-to-air missiles may be missing in Libya

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posted at 9:30 pm on September 27, 2011 by Allahpundit


Is this “news”? CNN reported three weeks ago that Qaddafi’s warehouses of SAMs were being carted off by unknown characters of unknown savoriness. The only new information here, from what I can tell, is that the situation hasn’t changed much almost a month later. From CNN’s Sept. 7 report:

Peter Bouckaert, Human Rights Watch emergencies director, told CNN he has seen the same pattern in armories looted elsewhere in Libya, noting that “in every city we arrive, the first thing to disappear are the surface-to-air missiles.”

He said such missiles can fetch many thousands of dollars on the black market.

“We are talking about some 20,000 surface-to-air missiles in all of Libya, and I’ve seen cars packed with them.” he said.

“They could turn all of North Africa into a no-fly zone.”…

The governments of neighboring Niger and Chad have both said that weapons from Libya are already being smuggled into their countries, and they are destined for al Qaeda.

The White House tells ABC they’ve sent five specialists to Libya to coordinate with the rebels in capturing and destroying the remaining missiles.

Three problems with that.

One: Given how chaotic the country is, with the “rebel army” really just a bunch of different militias fighting under the same banner, it must be nearly impossible for the rebel government to have its orders to seize the missiles carried out. If you were an impoverished Libyan kid leading a squad of fighters and you stumbled upon a cache of SAMs, what would you do? Hand them over to someone in Benghazi whom you’ve never met and who might not be in power a month from now or cash in for hundreds of thousands of dollars on the black market?

Two: The new leader of the biggest rebel militia is a guy named Abdel Hakim Belhaj, who, it turns out, is not only an Islamist who met Bin Laden while fighting the Russians in Afghanistan but who helped found a Libyan jihadist group that ended up on the State Department’s terror list. Do you suppose he’d be inclined to share some of those SAMs with Al Qaeda instead of forfeiting them to America’s “specialists”? Or, since our pockets are deeper than AQ’s, will he be a sport and merely extort us into buying them back, with the proceeds to be used for who knows what?

Three: The new power dynamics in Libya are such that it’d be nutty for any would-be warlord to disarm and place himself at the mercy of his countrymen. If any single theme has defined the media’s Libya coverage over the last month, in fact, it’s been disunity in the rebel ranks and emerging rivalries between the civilian leadership and military commanders.

Back on August 30, the Times described Tripoli as having been “divided into fiefs, each controlled by quasi-independent brigades representing different geographic areas of the country.” The next day the Guardian described how rebel fighters from Misrata refused to recognize the Benghazi council as the true government of the country. A few weeks later Foreign Policy worried about rising tensions between Islamists and liberals, troop leaders and civilian leaders, western Libyans and eastern Libyans, and overall discontent with the country’s new de facto prime minister. Then, eight days ago, WaPo flagged a predictable development:

About a month after rebels captured Tripoli and forced longtime leader Moammar Gaddafi to flee, revolutionary militia groups are sweeping up any weapons they can find, often from huge ammunition dumps left unguarded as his forces retreated…

Many of the weapons are heading to the Nafusa Mountains, home to Libya’s ethnic Berber minority, according to officials, commanders and well-connected businessmen. Others are going to Misurata, the coastal city that played a major role in resisting Gaddafi’s army during the revolution.

“These groups do not recognize any authority or any control,” the commander said. “These are areas which suffered a lot during the last few months of the regime, and now they think that whatever they do is justified.”…

[T]here is a sense in Tripoli that brigades and regions are sizing up one another based on how many fighters and weapons they possess.

Just two days ago, the Times filed a new update noting that rebel fighters continue to send newly discovered weapons back to their hometowns for hoarding rather than to Benghazi; meanwhile, the Libyan rebel government is deadlocked over the regional composition of the new parliament, which was entirely predictable in a society as tribalist as this one is. All of this is perfectly understandable, actually — if you’d been under Qaddafi’s thumb for 40 years, you’d want to arm yourself to the teeth at the first chance too — but it goes to show that realistically there’s no chance of getting these SAMs back soon. Maybe, if the new government managed to keep the peace for a few years, some hoarders would eventually feel secure enough to give up their missiles, but for now they need to prepare for the possibility of a civil war and/or the near-certainty of an insurgency, which may have already begun. Is it possible to convert a SAM like a Stinger into an RPG or IED? We’re about to find out.

Exit question: What other fun little toys are tucked away in Qaddafi’s warehouses? Hmmmm.

http://hotair.com/archives/2011/09/2...sing-in-libya/