In March 1962 the Israeli Defence Forces launched a raid on Syrian positions in the village of Al-Nuqayb, on the eastern shores of the Sea of Galilee. The raid, known as Operation Swallow (מבצע סנונית) was described by the IDF as a retaliation for Syrian attacks on Israeli fishermen in the Sea of Galilee. During the operation Israeli commandos captured a selection of weapons which were subsequently displayed for the press. In this article we’ll examine the weapons captured.
Machine Guns
The Egyptian Helwan 920 ‘Multi-Machine Gun’
In 2020 the Egyptian ministry of military production announced the manufacture of the first ‘multi-machine gun’, the announcement came with national pride as the Multi-Machine Gun (or multi-purpose machine gun possibly depending on translation) will be completely manufactured by Egypt. The machine gun, called the Helwan 920, was shown in the previous IDEX Conferences at Dubai IDEX 2017, Egypt EDEX 2018 and Egypt EDEX 2019 as prototypes. The weapon has appeared on Egyptian government arms sites since the early 2010s.
Iranian Small Arms in Somalia and the Horn of Africa
Since 2015 there have been at least 12 documented arms seizures off the Somalian and Yemeni coastlines by US, Saudi, and a variety of other navies. These weapons seizures range in size from 10s of rifles to hundreds of Anti-Tank Guided Missiles (ATGM) and thousands of Type 56-1 AKs.
ANSF Modifications of Weapons Captured by the Taliban During Their 2021 Offensive
I recently wrote a blog post for ARES (Armament Research Services), Silah Report is a subsidiary of ARES, about weapons captured by the Taliban during their 2021 offensive which toppled the Afghan Government. You can check out the article here.
This article will go over some of the modifications made to the weapons captured from ANSF (Afghan Security Forces) by the Taliban during their 2021 offensive. These modifications appear to have been made by the ANSF before they were captured.
Beirut Clashes – Weapons on the Street
This morning in Beirut, Lebanon was far from normal as the streets turned into a warzone and clashes erupted taking the lives of many people, injuring even more and forcing hundreds of families to flee their homes. We examine the causes and look at some of the small arms seen on Beirut’s streets.
A Review of Iran’s Defense Industries Organization (DIO) Latest Products: Part Two
In this second part of our series looking at the Iranian Defense Industries Organization (DIO)’s current offerings we will examine AR-15 pattern rifles, precision rifles, and machine guns. In the first part of this series we examined the origins of Persian and Iranian small arms manufacturing and explored some of the DIO’s submachine guns and rifle offerings.
The NSV and the Legacy of Western Kazakh Machine-Building Company
The NSV heavy machine gun (Utyos/Utes) is one of the most recognized and respected heavy machine guns on the battlefield today. The original NSV was designed by Grigory Nikitin, Yuri Sokolov, and Vladimir Volkov and produced by a few different Soviet satellite states.[i] The most well-known of these NSV manufacturers is the Western Kazakh Machine-Building Company (ZKMK), formerly MetallistJSC, a manufacturing plant in Uralsk, Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic (modern-day Kazakhstan).[ii] In this article we’ll examine the history of the Kazakh NSV.
Uzbek Fighters Visiting The Pak-Afghan Tribal-Area Markets
A long-lost video filmed by fighters of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, once thought lost to us who’ve been following the arms trade in the Pak-Afghan region over the last decade and longer, has recently resurfaced after a few years of it being pushed off the world-wide-web and into the deep reaches of the online archives. It was once again shared with us by our colleague Mick who runs an OSINT feed, much to our jubilation.
World War Two Era Weaponry in the Hands of ISIS in Sinai
Their is currently an insurgency being fought in Northern Sinai between the Egyptian military and security forces with ISIS’ branch “Wilayat Sainaa” (Sinai Province). We have found materials published by Egypt’s Ministry of Defense and Ministry of Interior that has listed some of the interesting gear and weaponry captured from ISIS. This includes World War Two era weaponry, DIY weapons, and what appears to be a single modified M1 helmet that could possibly have been the property of the Israeli Defense Forces once upon a time (this will be covered in a later article); this brings up the question: how much gear and weaponry were looted from battlefields by the locals during the conflicts between Egypt and Israel. In this article, we will present some of the rather exotic World War Two era weaponry while saving the DIY materials for a future article.
(Note: While World War Two era weaponry is quite a broad term that encompasses firearms still being used by modern-day armies such as the M2 Browning and the DShK heavy machine guns; this article will focus on small arms that are no longer in production, extremely rare to be acquired on the civilian and black markets and are not modern-day replicas.)
A Legal History Civilian Firearms Ownership in Iraq
The earliest Iraqi gun act was enacted in 1919 under the British mandate. Although the original text of this act cannot be found two amendments exist for this act. The first amendment for this act was ratified in 1932. It defined the licensing fees for firearms possession, repairing and selling licenses. The fees were 0.375 … Read more