Saudi Arabia has financed a large purchase of infantry weapons from Croatia and quietly funneled them to antigovernment fighters in Syria in a drive to break the bloody stalemate that has allowed President Bashar al-Assad to cling to power, according to American and Western officials familiar with the purchases.
The weapons began reaching rebels in December via shipments shuttled
through Jordan, officials said, and have been a factor in the rebels’
small tactical gains this winter against the army and militias loyal to
Mr. Assad.
The arms transfers appeared to signal a shift among several governments
to a more activist approach to assisting Syria’s armed opposition, in
part as an effort to counter shipments of weapons from Iran to Mr.
Assad’s forces. The weapons’ distribution has been principally to armed
groups viewed as nationalist and secular, and appears to have been
intended to bypass the jihadist groups whose roles in the war have
alarmed Western and regional powers.
For months regional and Western capitals have held back on arming the
rebels, in part out of fear that the weapons would fall into the hands
of terrorists. But officials said the decision to send in more weapons
is aimed at another fear in the West about the role of jihadist groups
in the opposition. Such groups have been seen as better equipped than
many nationalist fighters and potentially more influential.
The action also signals the recognition among the rebels’ Arab and
Western backers that the opposition’s success in pushing Mr. Assad’s
military from much of Syria’s northern countryside by the middle of last
year gave way to a slow, grinding campaign in which the opposition
remains outgunned and the human costs continue to climb.
Washington’s role in the shipments, if any, is not clear. Officials in
Europe and the United States, including those at the Central
Intelligence Agency, cited the sensitivity of the shipments and declined
to comment publicly.
But one senior American official described the shipments as “a maturing
of the opposition’s logistical pipeline.” The official noted that the
opposition remains fragmented and operationally incoherent, and added
that the recent Saudi purchase was “not in and of itself a tipping
point.”
“I remain convinced we are not near that tipping point,” the official said.
The official added that Iran, with its shipments to Syria’s government,
still outstrips what Arab states have sent to the rebels.
The Iranian arms transfers have fueled worries among Sunni Arab states
about losing a step to Tehran in what has become a regional contest for
primacy in Syria between Sunni Arabs and the Iran-backed Assad
government and Hezbollah of Lebanon.
Another American official said Iran has been making flights with weapons
into Syria that are so routine that he referred to them as “a milk
run.” Several of the flights were by an Iranian Air Force Boeing jet
using the name Maharaj Airlines, he said.
While Persian Gulf Arab nations have been sending military equipment and
other assistance to the rebels for more than a year, the difference in
the recent shipments has been partly of scale. Officials said multiple
planeloads of weapons have left Croatia since December, when many
Yugoslav weapons, previously unseen in the Syrian civil war, began to
appear in videos posted by rebels on YouTube.
Many of the weapons — which include a particular type of Yugoslav-made
recoilless gun, as well as assault rifles, grenade launchers, machine
guns, mortars and shoulder-fired rockets for use against tanks and other
armored vehicles — have been extensively documented by one blogger,
Eliot Higgins, who writes under the name Brown Moses and has mapped the new weapons’ spread through the conflict.
He first noticed the Yugoslav weapons in early January in clashes in the
Dara’a region near Jordan, but by February he was seeing them in videos
posted by rebels fighting in the Hama, Idlib and Aleppo regions.
Officials familiar with the transfers said the arms were part of an
undeclared surplus in Croatia remaining from the 1990s Balkan wars. One
Western official said the shipments included “thousands of rifles and
hundreds of machine guns” and an unknown quantity of ammunition.
Croatia’s Foreign Ministry and arms-export agency denied that such
shipments had occurred. Saudi officials have declined requests for
interviews about the shipments for two weeks. Jordanian officials also
declined to comment.
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