To help catch these people, the state senate passed a bill requiring all handgun ammunition sold or owned after 2007 in California to be marked, identifying the box from which it came. Ammunition dealers would be obligated to keep a record of sales, thus identifying each bullet shot and pegging it to the buyer. Gun owners were so incensed at the plan (cleverly labeled SB 357 after the .357 Magnum) that a Sacramento shooting club barred Department of Justice agents from firing on their range because of the attorney general’s support for the bill. The Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers’ Institute (SAAMI) opposed the bill, saying that implementation would cost hundreds of millions of dollars in new investment and raise the cost of each cartridge from pennies to dollars.
Law enforcement officials were split down the middle; some opponents suggested that the costs involved would not yield a worthwhile payoff, because criminals would simply use out-of-state ammunition. Law enforcement agencies were also concerned about the increased cost of ammunition that they would have to buy.
Another bill that attracted less controversy required that semiautomatic handguns imprint a microscopic stamp on casings as they were shot. In a criminal case, investigators would be able to match the gun (and presumably the owner) to the casings left behind at the scene. A company doing work in this area is NanoMark Technologies of Londonderry, New Hampshire, which holds a patent for “ballistic ID tagging.” Company officials contend that the ID tag is unambiguous—unlike bullet comparisons using conventional CSI-type ballistics methods—and leads directly to the weapon. The only shortcoming of the system is that the shooter could pick up the shell casings after firing, assuming the luxury of time and the presence of mind to collect them all.
To get around this problem, Seattle-based Ammunition Coding System developed a way of coding both the bullet and the cartridge casing. The company’s laser system imprints a unique identifying code on the inside of cartridge cases as well as the bullet. Both can be read with a magnifying glass. The company claims that the number can be read with as little as 20 percent of the bullet intact after firing. Testing by the San Bernadino County Sheriff ’s Department showed that they were able to read identification numbers in twenty-one of twenty-two instances. The only downside of this scheme is the high price of the engraving/handling equipment, from $300,000 to $500,000 per machine plus a per bullet licensing fee.
The implications of such bullet-tracing systems could be far-reaching. They could even keep small skirmishes from turning into regional wars. For example, UN officials had only casings to go on when they investigated a massacre at the Gatumba refugee camp in Burundi on the border of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Beginning between 10 and 11:30 p.m. on August 13, 2004, refugees heard the sound of drums and religious chants approaching. Several survivors reported hearing a whistle and orders being shouted just before the attack. Witnesses disagreed on the number of assailants—the figure varied from one hundred to three hundred—but their composition was not in doubt. The attackers’ ranks included armed men, women, and children, some wearing complete or partial military uniforms and others in street clothes. They spoke several different languages, including those common to Congo and Burundi, and shouted slogans such as “kill these dogs, these Tutsis,” and “down with the Banyamulenge” (Tutsis from the Congo communities of South Kivu).
When the attackers finished their raid, 152 refugees were dead, and 108 were wounded. Eight refugees were never found. Of the dead and missing, 147 were Banyamulenge. The attackers did not target other groups in the camp. The tents housing Burundian returnees had been left untouched.
The massacre occurred during a fragile time. After six years of war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and eleven years of war in Burundi, all sides were in the midst of winding down tensions both internally and externally when the attack occurred. Many people in the region considered the Banymulenge as pro-Rwandan even though they fought on both sides of the civil war in Congo. UN investigators suggested that the attackers’ goal was to reignite regional fighting and weaken transitional governments.
The plan began to work. The governments of Burundi and Rwanda threatened to attack Congo and ferret out those responsible for the massacre. Strong evidence indicated one group, the National Liberation Front (FNL), which may have been part of the attacking group, but they did not organize the action or carry it out alone, judging by the different languages spoken during the melee. Leaders of the Burundi-based FNL at first admitted participating in the attack but later recanted. The Hutu group justified the massacre, saying that the Tutsis were heading up a new war in Congo that would destabilize a region that had been working toward peace.
After Burundi’s first democratically elected president was assassinated in 1993, after only four months in office, war between the Hutus and Tutsi caused 200,000 deaths and displaced more than 1.3 million people both inside and outside the country. A massive wave of refugees entering Congo from Burundi and the concurrent genocide in Rwanda in the early 1990s sparked tribal wars and an overthrow of the Congolese government in 1997. When the newly installed regime was challenged by Rwandan and Ugandan rebels, the result was a regional war—pulling in additional countries—that left more than a million Congolese displaced. In addition, Rwandan rebels used Congo as a base to attack Rwanda, prompting Rwanda to invade.
The regional war surrounding the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly Zaire, has been dubbed “Africa’s first world war,” because it involved six nations, each with its own reasons for involvement, and at least twenty separate armed groups. Since the outbreak of large-scale fighting in 1997, at least 3.8 million people have died, mostly children, women, and the elderly, mainly due to starvation. (Some estimates put the figure as high as 4.5 million.) The prolonged war forced 2.25 million people from their homes, some into refugee camps like Gatumba. The war was the deadliest conflict since World War II, and it was fought mainly with small arms, AKs being the most popular weapon. Although hostilities officially ended in 2002, many of the armed groups continued to fight at the time of writing. To help maintain the delicate stability in the region, it was crucial for the United Nations to find physical evidence of the perpetrators and bring them to justice. This would go a long way to preventing further conflicts born from rumor and unsubstantiated facts.
Unfortunately, by the time investigators arrived at Gatumba camp, the area had been cleansed. Many bodies had been buried in mass graves without forensic examination. Evidence was contaminated and injured victims had been taken to hospitals, where workers rejected UN access to patients from the camp.
Investigators had little solid evidence to go on except some cartridge casings that had not been swept up. Of the thousands of rounds fired, four different cartridge types were found. Markings showed that one was manufactured in Bulgaria in 1995 by Arsenal Kazanlak, two from the People’s Republic of China in 1998 by an unknown armory, and one from Prvi Partizan in Uzice, Serbia.
Without any way to trace the ammunition to their buyers, UN investigators were stymied. Not even the manufacturers were able to identify the original recipients of the ammunition. Based on the cartridge configurations, however, the Bulgarian and Chinese cartridges were probably fired from AKs. Beyond that, nothing else could be determined, and the attackers remain at large.
The incident at Gatumba camp remains a flash point for the region. Fighting continues. Some FNL troops have confessed to the Gatumba murders, and may be tried for their crimes. Without additional physical evidence, however, most participants may never be brought to justice.
Proponents of marking and tracing claimed that linking ammunition to buyers might curtail such attacks—and subsequent mistaken retaliations escalating to regional war—if perpetrators believed there was a high probability they would be caught. Opponents contended that unscrupulous gun brokers will always find a way to sell unmarked goods, and a black market in unmarked ammunition and guns will undoubtedly develop.
Even if marking and tracing were
to begin tomorrow, however, there simply are too many older guns and caches of ammunition around to make any difference for the foreseeable future. Particularly in the case of AKs, it could take fifty years for some of today’s weapons to cease working; that, combined with the guns’ high tolerance for poorly made and deteriorating ammunition, means they could be functional and untraceable for decades. Johan Peleman, a Belgium-based arms investigator who has worked for the United Nations, put it starkly: “Tracing a twenty-year-old Kalashnikov, back to whoever delivered it, is virtually impossible.”
Some of these twenty-year-old AKs surfaced in Iraq after the United States invaded that country in 2003 in an effort to oust Saddam Hussein and destroy his supposed weapons of mass destruction. Once again, the Soviet-designed AK would go head-to-head with the U.S.-designed M-16, just as it had done in Vietnam more than forty years earlier.
8
AK VERSUS M-16: PART 2
IN 1999, IRAQI PRESIDENT Saddam Hussein ordered construction to begin on what would be the world’s largest mosque. On a hundred-acre site, fifteen miles outside of the capital city of Baghdad, the huge house of worship was part of the dictator’s plan to strengthen his iron-fist grip on the nation by appealing to the region’s Muslims even though his Baath Party had a history of disavowing religion and regularly harassing and killing Muslim fundamentalists.
The “Mother of All Battles” mosque was not only an attempt to curry favor with Iraq’s Muslims but also to pay homage to the Gulf War of 1991. Hussein had dubbed it the Mother of All Battles, in which Saddam’s invasion of neighboring Kuwait prompted a counterattack by a U.S.-led, UN-sanctioned coalition that drove Iraq out of the small, oil-rich country but left him in office with diminished military power.
Opened on April 28, 2002, Hussein’s birthday, the mosque was a tribute to its megalomaniac maker. The building housed a handwritten Koran reportedly produced from three pints of Hussein’s blood mixed with ink and preservatives, a pool in the shape of the Arab world, and a twenty-four-foot-wide mosaic of the president’s thumbprint. Outside, forty-three-meter-high minarets, symbolizing the forty-three-day conflict with the United States, reached skyward. These minarets were fashioned in the shape of Scud missiles, the NATO name for the R-11 missile built by the Soviet Union during the cold war. Hussein’s military blasted Scuds into Israel and Saudi Arabia during the Mother of All Battles. These crude, inexpensive, but effective short-range missiles were often launched from trucks, and could deliver a conventional explosive warhead, a small nuclear bomb, antipersonnel bomblets, or biological or chemical weapons.
The mosque also sported four outer minarets. Like those closest to the main building, these towers were exact images of another Soviet-made, simple, inexpensive, and mobile weapon that Hussein revered. Standing thirty-seven meters high—signifying Saddam’s birth year, 1937—these barrel-shaped minarets were replicas of Tabuk assault rifle barrels, Iraq’s version of the AK.
Although Saddam’s regime officially denied that the minarets were designed like either of these weapons, the look is unmistakable. In the case of the AK minarets, the towers even included the gun’s distinctively shaped handguard that provides a tight grip on the barrel during automatic fire. Like Scud missiles, the AK offered Saddam Hussein simple weapons born from the Soviet utilitarian mind-set. They were cheap and deadly.
Although coalition bombings in 1991 destroyed much of Iraq’s air force, Scud missiles, and tanks, Hussein’s regime retained its arsenal of small arms, especially AKs. In fact, by March 2003 when the Iraq war, or Operation Iraqi Freedom, as it was called by the United States, commenced, Iraq’s arsenals were brimming with small arms, perhaps as many as seven to eight million pieces. These weapons would prove deadly to U.S. troops once major hostilities ended, but were not considered a threat by military planners when the war began.
The war commenced with air and ground attacks led by Vietnam veteran General Tommy Franks. Believing that Iraq had violated UN sanctions against building and warehousing weapons of mass destruction—chemical, biological, and nuclear arms—President George W. Bush gave Franks the go-ahead. Although military pundits had expected lengthy air bombings as a prelude to entering ground forces, as in the 1991 Gulf War or the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Franks instead ordered ground troops to enter the southern tip of Iraq through Kuwait and make their way to Baghdad as fast as they could. Just as the German army motored swiftly through the Ardennes in 1940, bypassing small villages on the way to Dunkirk and Paris, U.S. troops traveled at top speed, ignoring small towns on their way north to the capital city. Pentagon planners believed that by attacking Baghdad and destroying the nation’s command-and-control capabilities, they would cause the regime to disintegrate, and the Iraqi people would overwhelmingly support the invaders as liberators. Once Baghdad was under U.S. control, Pentagon strategists believed that these bypassed towns and villages would fall into line.
As U.S. forces advanced across Iraq, one of their first objectives was to secure the Rumaila oil fields, an area that extends underground into Kuwait. During the Gulf War, Hussein’s soldiers ignited theses wells not only to hide their movements amid the dense smoke but to distract coalition forces. Franks was determined to prevent Iraq’s army from burning the oil wells again and ordered GIs to secure the fields. This action would also pay postwar benefits, because President Bush hoped that the country’s valuable oil supply would help defray the costs of Iraq’s reconstruction.
One of the groups assigned to the area was the 1st Battalion of the 5th Marines. Wearing bulky and hot chemical protection suits, Alpha Company was one of the first large ground units to make its way across the Kuwaiti border. After an eight-hour drive, it reached Pumping Station No. 2. Once a base for an Iraqi brigade, the station was largely abandoned save for a few die-hard fighters. The marines took several Iraqi prisoners during skirmishes, but then something unexpected occurred.
A half dozen Iraqis, possibly from Hussein’s elite Republican Guard, took off in a brown Toyota pickup truck, in what several marines later said resembled a drive-by shooting. The retreating Iraqis fired AKs wildly out the windows, hitting Second Lieutenant Therrel “Shane” Childers, in the lower abdomen. Childers, a thirty-year-old marine from Harrison, Mississippi, and a graduate of the Citadel military college, died almost immediately. He was the first U.S. casualty of Operation Iraqi Freedom. For most of the marines in his company, it was their first look at the AK in combat, but it would not be their last. What perhaps frightened them most was the way these soldiers used their weapons. While U.S. troops were highly trained and disciplined and taught to make every shot count, these soldiers fired indiscriminately, without regard to whom they would hit. They were successful. They had killed one marine and injured several others. How could a professionally trained force engage and win against this type of soldier?
Other advancing troops avoided major cities except when necessary to gain control of strategic bridges across the Tigris and Euphrates. The first indication that the U.S. plan was running into trouble—although it was eclipsed in the news by the stunning and swift march toward Baghdad—occurred in the bypassed city of Basra, Iraq’s second largest city, just north of the Kuwaiti border. As U.S. troops pushed onward, British troops were sent to secure it. To the surprise of military brass, it took two weeks of fighting for the British to enter the city, a conflict that included the largest tank battle the British had seen since World War II. Once Iraq’s tanks were destroyed, however, fighting still continued, turning into close-quarter urban warfare. British troops found themselves under constant small-arms attack from Iraqi army regulars and fedayeen fighters.
Fedayeen is the plural of an Arabic word meaning “one who is ready to sacrifice his life for his cause.” The first fedayeen in the eighth to fourteenth centuries were a group of Ismali Muslims belonging to the Shia sect of Islam, who terrorized the Abbasids, the Sunni Muslims who ruled Baghdad. This religious group was also known by the name hashishin because it was claimed th
at they put themselves into a fierce fighting-frenzy state by taking hashish before battles. (The modern word “assassin” is derived from their name, as many of their terrorist tactics involved murdering rulers.)
There have been several notable fedayeen groups throughout history. This latest group of fighters, Fedayeen Saddam, were handpicked by Hussein’s regime and put under control of his son Uday. Their loyalty to Hussein and the Baath Party assured they would fight to the death against any invader. This paramilitary group, whose numbers may have reached thirty thousand to forty thousand fighters, were used by Hussein to put down opponents and smuggle arms and drugs in the region. Despite their numbers, the international community knew little about them until Hussein pressed them into military service during the U.S. invasion. Their weapon of choice was the AK.
As the U.S. military pressed toward Baghdad, their supplies lagged behind. At about the 250-mile mark, supplies on the front lines became scarce—food, water, and fuel—and supply convoys had to play catch-up. These lightly armored trucks were easy prey for fedayeen ambushes. Although many of the convoys were given cover by helicopters, others were attacked by hit-and-run raids. Fuel tankers were favorite targets because they were slow-moving, and exploding, burning fuel had a dramatic effect.
AK-47: The Weapon that Changed the Face of War Page 20