In the 17th episode of our podcast, we had a new guest from the Kurdistan region who was well versed in the small arms market in the region. The host for the episode was Adham and we had Miles, Daniel, Khyber Abdullah, Mick, our patron Nate and last but not least, our guest from Kurdistan, Rasty.
If you’d like to have your questions answered by our panel during an edition of the podcast, please support Silah Report on Patreon and submit questions as often as you like!
If you missed the previous episode, you can find it here.
Check out the podcast here and listen along with the photographs below!
https://soundcloud.com/silah-report/v19-smalls-arms-in-kurdistan-region-and-the-local-laws
Podcast Running Order:
Silah Report Announcements
Presentations:
Gun Sales in Kurdistan
The Silah Report Reference Collection’s New Carcano
.303 Reloading in Darra
Syrian PKM with Foregrip
Gun Sales in Kurdistan
Rasty gave us an insight into the prices of a variety of small arms in the region, as well the ability of locals to buy certain firearms, how to get legal permits and the extreme obstacles foreigners face when they try to acquire weapons in Kurdistan. Private military companies (or PMCs) and security contractors and their ability to purchase weapons from the local markets was also discussed in detail.
The Silah Report Reference Collection’s New Carcano
(36:00) Miles and Daniel gives us an insight into a beautiful Carcano rifle, which is now part of the Silah Report Reference Collection which spent some time in Egypt post-WWII.
Patreon Shoutout
If you would like to support our work on researching small arms and light weapons in the MENA and Central Asian regions, please consider joining our Patreon support network that allows us to get articles, videos, and podcasts such as these to an international audience. Check us out here! As a patron you are also entitled to ask questions for our podcast panel to discuss and answer.
.303 Reloading in Darra
(44:35) Khyber Abdullah shows us .303 getting deprimed for reload in Darra! Khyber mentioned that the cases dated from 1942 and believed they were marked with ‘WPA’, these rounds are most likely actually marked W.R.A. – this indicates they were produced by the Winchester Repeating Arms Co.
Syrian PKM with Foregrip
(51:00) Miles shares and discusses with us this image for a Syrian rebel in the SNA (Syrian National Army faction) which is a modified PKM. A foregrip was added and the standard wooden stock replaced with seems to be a simple folding metal stock. Whether that modification is a one-off or is some sort of standardization still remains to be seen.
During the discussion Daniel also showed us this modified PKM with a type 56-2 stock added to it, which had incidentally been shared by Mick.
PKM which was retrofitted with a folding stock and freshly painted in #Idlib. pic.twitter.com/NmJOENV6F4
— Mick – ميك (@AnalystMick) October 26, 2019
Credits
Introduction audio is taken from the movie Son of a Lion, with permission of the director Benjamin Gilmour. The conversation takes place in the Kyber Pakhtunkwa (KPK) region of Pakistan and is between a customer examining a “Krinkov”-patterned rifle that is for sale.
Music is traditional Arabic Dabkha by the name of
اغاني دبكة تي رش رش
Patreon Shoutout
If you want to support our work on researching small arms and light weapons in the MENA and Central Asian regions, please consider joining our Patreon support network that allows us to get articles, videos, and podcasts such as these to an international audience. Check us out here!
www.patreon.com/SilahReport