Throughout this year, as fighting intensified in Syria and antigovernment fighters grew in numbers and in strength, it had seemed inevitable that they would acquire heat-seeking shoulder-fired missiles and turn them against the Syrian military aircraft.
This blog had documented the part-by-part appearance in rebel hands of one old heat-seeking system, known as the SA-7. Since midsummer there have been occasional sightings of full systems but none, as far as we know, showing the system in actual use.
Two videos recently posted on YouTube suggest that what had been expected is now occurring.
The first video, embedded below and posted today, shows what would appear to be a two-man hunter-killer team with an SA-7, waiting for an aircraft from hiding behind a building. Matthew Schroeder, an analyst who covers missile proliferation and the arms trade at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, noted “the glint of the missile’s seeker head, so the missile is in the tube.” This, along with the visible battery and grip stock, indicates that the system is complete.The man with the SA-7 does not loiter; he is soon picked up by another man on a light motorcycle.
The second video shows what appears to be a weapon of the same class being fired at a passing fixed-wing jet. The video is not perfect. And it is not possible in the jerky and grainy video to determine which type of missile is in use, but at about 2:02 its audio seems to capture the sound of a missile’s launching and then shows the telltale corkscrew signature of the weapon through the air.
The missile appears to miss and – from here things become less clear – it is possible that the video shows lingering flares from the area where the missile traveled in flight. This might be the signature of a countermeasure system in the targeted aircraft, which dumped the flares to confuse and thwart the missile’s seeker head.
These videos were shared this morning with The New York Times by Damien Spleeters (@damspleet), a Belgian arms researcher and an occasional contributor to At War.
Mr. Spleeters has set up and maintains a map of sightings of man-portable air-defense systems, or Manpads (to use the security world’s clunky acronym) in Syria. This has become something of an Internet trap line for missile sightings, and a reader that Mr. Spleeters does not know, Mads Dahl (@massdall), alerted him to these new videos.
The videos have not been verified. Their contents cannot be readily confirmed. But they do appear authentic and to show what analysts have expected to see for some time: evidence of Manpads in use by Syria’s rebels.
A few points of context can help decipher what the sightings might mean.
First, the SA-7 is an old system. Many commentators tend to say that because it is old, its battery might lack adequate charge to activate the system, acquire a target and initiate the launching. In other words, old SA-7s might not fire. That may be so, but there is ample evidence that many old SA-7s do in fact fire, as was seen last year in Libya, where SA-7s from the 1980s were captured by fighters opposed to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and fired several times.
While battery life is an issue worth considering, a more relevant issue for the conflict might be the capabilities of the weapon. The SA-7 is an early Soviet entrant into the Manpads field. It is a dated system, it can be employed from a narrower engagement window than a more up-to-date system, and it is vulnerable to countermeasures. These systems are generally regarded as being less effective against modern military jets than they are against helicopters, or, for that matter, civilian aircraft.
The above reasons are among many reasons why aviation security circles worry intensely over the potential spread of SA-7s from any nation that holds them, and why many Western countries have encouraged militaries to consider destroying the old stock. After all, what value to a modern state is a weapon that has limited utility in war, but could be a terrible weapon for a terrorist or inexperienced guerrilla who turns an SA-7 toward a lumbering passenger jet?
Second, Manpads are not the only means of bringing down aircraft. Many heavy machine guns were designed for this purpose, and can work well against lower-elevation targets, as has been seen at the Abu Ad Duhur air base and in this video, which shows, at 0:22, a helicopter assuming the glide path of a pallet of cement blocks after apparently being struck on a rotor by a machine-gun round.
