Open season on Blackhawks...Iraqi Resistance has Soviet SAMs

[farmbo]

http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/11/09/sprj.irq.main/index.html

TIKRIT, Iraq (CNN) -- Military sources say they believe a Soviet-built surface-to-air missile brought down a Black Hawk helicopter that crashed near Saddam's hometown of Tikrit, killing all six aboard.

Friday's deadly crash added to a bloody week for the coalition. Thirty-seven U.S. troops and one Polish soldier died in Iraq in the first week of November alone.

Sources with the 4th Infantry Division told CNN they suspect a Soviet-built Kolomna KBM Strela-3 low-altitude surface-to-air missile (SAM) hit the helicopter, using an infrared guidance system.
<snip>

This is bad medicine for our troops and perhaps signals a shift in the strategic alignment of our "allies" in the area.
Presently, there are no indications that the missiles were covertly provided to the resistance by Russia, Georgia or any other CIS countries. The technology is Soviet- era and could have been acquired off the black market. But these deadly beauties were not rumored to have been part of Saddam's pre-war arsenal.

So where did they come from...and who stands to benefit from the US being bogged down in a bloody stalemate in Iraq?

[Media_Lies_Daily]

1. Oh, please. Are we sure they're not U.S. built Stingers,...

...weapons WE supplied by the hundreds of thousands to Afghanistan, some of which could have very easily made their to Iraq?

And even if they are missiles of non-U.S. origin, how easy would they have been to obtain from local black-market arms dealers?

More propaganda from CNN...this time trying to make Russia look like the bad guy.

[fishnfla]

2. I really dont care where they came from

its where they are going thats the problem

[Name removed]

12. Deleted message

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[LittleApple81]

16. What???? are you providing fodder for quotes in Sullivan's blog??

[Name removed]

17. Deleted message

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[jarab]

19. Explain, please. n/t

...O...

[Cocoa]

8. I'm under the impression that everyone has Stingers

there are so many of them out there that they've made their way into the arsenals of every insurgent group around the world, particularly the Colombian rebels.

So yes, I don't see any reason the Iraqis wouldn't have them, and yes, I could see how the U.S. would be embarrassed by this.

[Noordam]

9. NO it is not STINGERS from Afghanistan.....

I am tired of the stingers from Afghanistan stories.

Stingers has a SHELF LIFE 7 Years because of the batteries in them. The stingers shipped to Afghanistan most likely are dead.........

"Afghan-era Stingers are widely believed to be inoperable because of their age. But military experts say that while the Stinger's official military shelf life is seven years, with good maintenance and care they can be fired long after that. "*

http://www.iraqfoundation.org/news/2003/joct/8_missiles.html

Good maintenance is the replacement of the batteries. Think Iraq, heat and good maintenance.

[DUreader]

11. batteries are alot easier to smuggle than missiles

[Cocoa]

18. maybe

or maybe we'll be reading years from now how they figured out how to get them working.

[RC]

3. ...and who stands to benefit

from the US being bogged down in a bloody stalemate in Iraq?

Answer: The rest of the world.

[formactv]

4. SAMS

What kind of missiles did Reagan sell the Iranians during the Iran-Contra Deal?
There were 1000 I thought. Tomahawks? What kind of missiles are those?

[sam sarrha]

10. They were STINGER's.....and what president gave Osahma about a 1000 during

the Afghan war with Russia...????

[La_Serpiente]

5. The International Arms Trade

is probably one of the most covert trades on the planet. It is also very dangerous.

[nostamj]

6. cablewhores this morning

were still pushing the 'crash' and that the cause being 'under investigation' which every print report and the INITIAL cable reports clearly stated that the chopper was SHOT DOWN.

the spin is SO blatant to anyone who gets news beyond the cablewhores but millions we believe that the insurgents are NOT succeeding.

[Aidoneus]

7. there were probably stores of them

in the Iraqi army warehouses. Not difficult to seize & distribute them after the gov't was overthrown.

This is a heresy in these parts, but believe it or not:--not everything that goes on in the world can be laid at the feet of "BFEE".

[farmbo]

13. Putin (former KGB) could "inadvertently" allow some to disappear

...Perhaps through Cechnya?

[KoKo]

14. Doesn't really matter where they come from. That they want to use them

on us is the problem. And, if no one used them until now, says the population waited to see how we would handle things before shooting at us. At least that's how many Americans who aren't on DU may start to see it. The escalation is what's important. That we are now targets because if we'd done things correctly in the first place, we wouldn't be inviting this retaliation now.

[Larkspur]

15. Saddam had ties with the Serbian mafia and I bet they are reaping Euros

from Saddam or his successors. It was the Serbian Mafia that helped Saddam make millions via the black market oil sales.

Remember, we found US Dollars, not Euros. Wonder where Saddam hid the Euros?

[MrPrax]

20. They found Euros...

about 800 million worth with the US cash...might all be counterfeit.

But remember the story about the Smuggler?

"There has been much media hype about a joint operation mounted by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Russia's Federal Security Service, and the MI5 (Security Service) and MI6 (Secret Intelligence Service) of the United Kingdom that resulted in the arrest of three persons, one of them a British arms smuggler, and the recovery of a surface-to-air missile (SAM) of Russian make, which had been procured in Russia and smuggled to the United States for possible sale to jihadi terrorists. "
<snip>
"This should not, however, detract from the serious concerns of the intelligence and security services all over the world over the possibility of terrorists acquiring SAMs. During the Afghan war of the 1980s against the Soviet troops, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) issued a large number of its shoulder-fired Stinger missiles to the Afghan mujahideen. After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1988, it mounted a special drive to buy back from the mujahideen the unused missiles. The drive was not successful. The CIA's anger against Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) for its non-cooperation in this drive was one of the reasons that led to then president Bill Clinton's decision in the beginning of 1993 to place Pakistan for six months on a so-called watch list of suspected state sponsors of international terrorism.

Under US pressure, Nawaz Sharif, the then Pakistani prime minister, had to sack Lieutenant-General Javed Nasir, his director general of the ISI, and some other senior officers of the ISI named by the United States as responsible for encouraging the mujahideen not to give back the unused Stingers to the CIA.

The collapse of the USSR in 1991 also led to the leakage of a number of SAMs of Soviet make into the smugglers' market. When the Najibullah government collapsed in Kabul in April 1992, ISI officers rushed there and took possession of all the unused Soviet missiles in the stocks of Najibullah's army. The subsequent disposal of these missiles has not been accounted for. Some of them landed in the hands of the jihadi terrorists of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) of Sri Lanka. There were also unconfirmed reports of the Abu Sayyaf and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front of the southern Philippines getting some of them through the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen of Pakistan. "

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/EH15Aa02.html