{"id":32554,"date":"2012-10-24T13:04:05","date_gmt":"2012-10-24T17:04:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=32554"},"modified":"2012-10-24T13:04:05","modified_gmt":"2012-10-24T17:04:05","slug":"stingers-in-syria","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=32554","title":{"rendered":"Stingers in Syria"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stars & Stripes<\/a> is reporting that the Russians claim that Syrian rebels have an unknown number of Stinger missiles.<\/p>\n

Gen. Nikolai Makarov, the chief of the military’s General Staff, didn’t say how many such missiles the rebels had and who supplied them. Makarov said Wednesday in remarks carried by Russian news agencies that some of the weapons could have been delivered by commercial airlines, but he didn’t elaborate.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

However, according to Reuters<\/a>, the Pentagon is denying that the missiles were supplied by the US;<\/p>\n

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said on Wednesday he had no knowledge of the United States supplying Stinger missiles to Syrian rebel forces, after Moscow said the rebels had acquired the U.S.-made surface-to-air missiles.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

A U.S. defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters the United States was unable to confirm that the rebels had acquired U.S. Stingers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m guessing that most likely culprit is our NATO ally, Turkey, which has been known to be supplying the Syrians rebels with arms. So, I’m sure some rocket scientist troll will claim that the Stingers are left over from when we armed the mujaheddin in Afghanistan, but that’s not possible. Any missiles we gave them and that we weren’t able to buy back after the Soviets left have degraded beyond any serviceable use by now.<\/p>\n

Of course, there are more than 29 nations that field Stingers, so who knows, but since the Russians are pretty mad at the Turks for downing their illegal weapons resupply to the Syrian government a week or so ago, I’m guessing that they’re blowing the whistle on Turkey to even the score.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stars & Stripes is reporting that the Russians claim that Syrian rebels have an unknown number … Stingers in Syria<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,84],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-foreign-policy","category-military-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32554"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32554\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}