Libyan Rebels Take Risks With Makeshift Arms
By C.J. CHIVERS
In cheerful and crisp English, Adel Sanfad presented his new weapon, which was mounted on a welded frame to back of his jeep and near the front lines in eastern Libya. “These used to be for airplanes,” he said. Then he added, in a flash of pride that was undercut slightly with a wince: “But we modified them.”
Behind Mr. Sanfad was a pod of air-to-ground rockets, of the sort used by attack aircraft to fire on targets below. His system was fully loaded and armed, ready to go. In the past 10 days, several of these repurposed aviation munitions, recycled for new lives as truck-to-ground weapons systems, have appeared at the front, where they have been fired repeatedly by the Forces of Free Libya, as the rebels hoping to unseat Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi call themselves. In this case, the weapon was a freshly made accoutrement to Mr. Sanfad’s life as a technical – a mobile combatant on an open truck, roaming the highways of the Libyan desert while mixing civilian and military equipment to wage a conventional war.
When it comes to mounting aviation weapons systems on pickup trucks, these kinds of weapons are, in a word, a sight. They are also a fright. They seem to spring from some post-apocalyptic dream, and in the eyes of many rebels their mere presence among otherwise lightly equipped forces suggests promise and power. But this is not quite so. In truth, the men who fire them have little idea of how far these rockets fly, a limited ability to change their elevation, and, (depending on the makeshift mount), often have no ability to traverse them left or right. Often times, those who fire them fire them this way: They point the front grill of their truck in the rough direction of the intended target, and commence launching a barrage. The result is obvious even before the first rockets whooshes into the air. Those involved can make their high-explosive rockets go up. They have only the faintest sense of where the rockets will come down.
No one can reasonably dispute that this is indiscriminate fire, and there is already a small undercurrent of anger among the rebels at some of those who fire them. The rockets have often landed near other rebels, who, in their view, face quite enough incoming munitions from Col. Qaddafi’s troops. By some credible accounts, it was an errant barrage of 57-millimeter rockets from another pod like this one that killed Dr. Salah al-Awami last week.
Dr. al-Awami, a fourth-year medical student who bravely provided first aid on the battlefield, was struck by shrapnel as he sat in ambulance returning to the front to retrieve and treat rebels wounded when a NATO aircraft mistakenly attacked a rebel convoy. The so-called Dernah Brigade, which has mounted several rocket pods designed for Mi-24 helicopter gunships on its small fleet of pickup trucks, had been firing barrages of 57-millimeter rockets recklessly in the area at the same time, witnesses said.
Many Libyan rebels – more spirited than experienced – nonetheless approve of their rocket brigades. With their almost sci-fi aesthetic, and the tremendous noise and show they make when fired, they are a morale-booster for troops who know little of effective tactics or of how modern weapons actually work.
The rebel formations are remarkable for the social diversity, and Mr. Sanfad was of a type — an American-educated Libyan who had joined the uprising out of a sense that this was the one chance in his life to unseat the Qaddafi family, which he regards as ossified, brutal, and corrupt. He was a bright-eyed and collegial man in what he knew was a horrible business. “I would like the war to end tomorrow,” he said. “This is my hope.” He also had a sense playful sense of humor. “After the war,” he told a reporter, “I will let you play with this weapon.”
Having lived in Santa Monica, Calif., he teased a photographer from Pasadena that the people of California “smoke too much dope.”
To his credit, he seemed to grasp the mix of absurdity and desperation behind the decision to fight this way. “It is dangerous,” he said. “But we have no choice. We have to take the risk because you can see we have almost no other weapons, and Qaddafi has all the lethal weapons available in the world.”
The ground war in eastern Libya has provided many examples of the potential regional security consequences inherent to brittle nations amassing stockpiles of military arms. As has been seen in many other nations that have swiftly fractured, the weapons rush out, and can be put to uses that vary from illicit to unwise. Since the uprising began here in mid-February, and many of the Libyan government’s weapons and munitions slipped from state custody, all manner of weapons have been visible on the streets.
The New York Times and this blog has covered at some length the risks posed by the loose stockpiles of heat-seeking, shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles, or Manpads, which could readily be diverted via smuggling networks to people who might turn them against civilian passenger aircraft. In the weeks since those missiles first were seen loose in the field, many other dangers have been evident – from landmines, machine guns, and from unexploded ordnance that now litters the battlefield and the roads that trace through it.
In the past days, the rebels have driven more and more of these makeshift rocket systems to the battlefield, readying them for the next effort to push westward toward Libya’s oil infrastructure, and, in many rebels’ minds, toward Sirte and Tripoli. More of the pods seem to be recycled in this way. The picture at this link shows a load of newly scrounged pods being moved to Benghazi , the rebel capital, to be fitted to trucks. With weapons such as these arriving in large numbers, the dangers to civilians and to civilian infrastructure, and of friendly-fire against rebel formations, can only rise.
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