Taliban Gun Lockers: The Rifles of Rural Ghazni Province
Posted: Sun Feb 06, 2011 6:35 am
Source: Say Uncle to NYTimes
By C.J. CHIVERS
ORWARD OPERATING BASE ANDAR, Afghanistan — This month Tyler Hicks and I have been working alongside the soldiers of Task Force Iron, an infantry battalion from the 101st Airborne Division that soon will complete a one-year tour in Afghanistan. We’re busy editing photographs and wrapping up reporting on some of the operations we observed alongside American soldiers and Afghan police and intelligence officers, and will have at least two stories for the newspaper soon. As we work, we want to pause to share a fresh look at some of the Taliban’s weapons, based on the battalion’s recent captures from slain Taliban fighters or caches, as a means to understanding more fully how the Taliban fights.
Task Force Iron is what the military colloquially calls a “surge battalion” – one of the units dispatched to Afghanistan as part of the Obama administration’s campaign to subdue the Taliban insurgency and train Afghanistan’s national security forces to assume responsibility for the country’s security within a few years. The battalion spent much of its tour in Paktika Province. But since mid-September it has been working in the Andar and Deh Yak districts of eastern Ghazni Province, two agrarian areas near the storied city of Ghazni. These districts contain clusters of ancient villages on the high steppe, and they have had scant American presence since the war began in 2001. The battalion arrived to find the villages poor, largely disconnected from the central government and crowded with Taliban fighters, some of whom were eager to fight. (Those of you who follow English-language Afghan coverage closely will recall that this is the area where the journalist Nir Rosen, the author of Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America’s Wars in the Muslim World, reported firsthand for Rolling Stone on his brief travels with Taliban fighters in 2008.)
We’re working on a story about Taliban organization and tactics in this patch of countryside. But when we arrived, we found that the task force’s intelligence section and its commanding officer, Lt. Col. David G. Fivecoat, had been reading the At War blog, and had assembled data and set aside recently captured weapons for the blog’s readers. Their advance work allows us to update our Taliban Gun Locker post and present a local look at how a complex but financially limited insurgency equips itself to fight materially superior American and Afghan units.
First, the numbers: Between Nov. 27, 2010, and Jan. 20, 2011, the battalion captured 43 rifles, two PK machine guns, two RPK squad machine guns, 6 rocket-propelled grenade launchers, a shotgun, three pistols and an 82-millimeter mortar system. Of the rifles, 37 were Kalashnikov assault rifles of mixed vintage and varied provenance, five were Lee-Enfield bolt-action rifles and one was an SKS. This was a familiar mix for the current Afghan war. Most of the equipment was superficially in disrepair, but otherwise functional, although one of the Lee-Enfield rifles had a loose, freely moving stock and was in no condition for accurate shooting.
Within the assortment, two of these rifles were particularly eye-catching: a pair of apparent Short Magazine Lee Enfields, known among those who follow firearms evolution as S.M.L.E.’s, that were captured by the battalion’s B Company during a village sweep on Dec. 24. (I say apparent for a reason; more on that in a moment.)
We’ve seen aged Lee-Enfields in Afghan service in the past, and At War has written about their presence in Marja and their use by a better breed of Taliban marksmen in Helmand Province. We won’t repeat those posts here. You can go back and read them for insights into how the officially obsolete arms of old empires still find their way to war, and can be put to effective local use by insurgent cells.
In this case, the Lee-Enfield rifles captured in Ghazni Province allow the blog to examine the diversity – and the limits – of Taliban weapon supply, and to highlight a longstanding element of the Afghan firearms trade.
Why? Because although these rifles retained the distinct Lee-Enfield form, they were not quite right. Both bore unusual factory symbols. And one bore a date stamp of 1881 – a year that predated by more than two decades the period when Short Magazine Lee-Enfield rifles were manufactured for British military service. Spotting an 1881 SMLE was akin to seeing a Chevy Corvette accompanied by documents claiming that it had been assembled in the 1930s. In a nutshell, the date stamp was making an impossible claim. But there it was.
Uploaded with ImageShack.us
This led to the natural next step. We made photographs of the rifles’ markings and pushed them through the satellite connection to the e-mail address of a curator of the Royal Armouries Museum in the United Kingdom – perhaps the most readily accessible bank of knowledge on infantry rifles in the world. (Lee-Enfields were for several decades the standard infantry arms of British units and their colonial partners. They have been manufactured in several countries and have had a wide distribution, and due to their diverse markings an expert eye is at times required to trace one to its likely point of origin.) In this case, the curator at the arms museum, Jonathan Ferguson, swiftly solved the puzzle. There would be no tracing these rifles to conventional factories, because no conventional factories were involved. Task Force Iron had captured Pakistani knock-offs of the British empire’s former standard arm.
Here is part of Mr. Ferguson’s reply.
Both rifles would appear to be locally made copies, commonly known as “Khyber Pass” guns. The fit, finish, and form of individual parts are all “off,” but the dead giveaways on each are the markings. The first rifle bears a supposed manufacture date of 1881. The SMLE was not approved until 1902, the Mk.III* that this is purporting to be not until 1916! If this were a conversion of the old long Lee-Enfield or the original Lee-Metford this would be evident in the markings, and the mark number would be IV rather than III. This is all academic however, since even the original Lee-Metford was only approved in 1888 – seven years after this rifle was supposedly made!
The second rifle has a spurious Birmingham Small Arms Company mark (wrong size, uneven lettering) below a weird and wonderful logo of some kind – certainly not the BSA logo (two crossed rifles).
The gunsmiths of Pakistan are a famous phenomenon, and have been widely documented over the past decades. In a network of small shops and factories along Pakistan’s western frontier, local tradesmen have for generations produced handmade copies of well-established infantry arms, and helped keep Pashtun tribesmen supplied. Their weapons are available, along with original items (often pilfered from government units), in local bazaars. These weapons appear to be the product of this trade, although it is hard to tell by visual inspection when exactly they were made. They could have been produced a few years ago, or many decades back.
It’s worth noting a few items to put these rifles into local as well as historical context.
First, a point about the enduring utility to insurgents of small arms and light weapons: Based on Task Force Iron’s so-called “significant action” reports, automatic rifles, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades remain the pre-eminent weapons used by Taliban fighters in Ghazni. American soldiers here have been attacked by rifles and machine guns almost daily, while the use of improvised bombs and mortars are comparatively much less common. (A look at the wounding data from the battalion shows it aligns with consistent patterns in the war, with improvised bombs causing a larger volume of American wounds, but gunshot wounds proving to be more lethal to those who have the misfortune of being struck.) The Taliban’s small arms are also the tools with which the insurgents threaten local civilians, harass American patrols and generally maintain martial influence over the districts. Earlier this month, for example, the Taliban stopped the car of a local man who had provided information to the American infantry company in Deh Yak. He was taken from the vehicle, fatally shot, and left beside the dirt road.
Second, in this zone of frequent (and usually brief) small-arms attacks, the Lee-Enfield line has not been widely used. The officers in the battalion’s intelligence section said there had been only a few incidents of the single-shot, carefully aimed fire, compared to almost uncountable attacks by automatic arms fired in bursts at American patrols. This tactical fact is evident in the body language of the American soldiers on patrols. When snipers are about, troops quickly learn to mask their movements and reduce their exposure in subtle ways – by kneeling, crouching, remaining behind walls or constantly moving in erratic steps, a set of deliberate behaviors that can frustrate a watching sniper’s aim. The Americans here, however, often move confidently across the open. They are alert to the possibility of ambush, but not apparently worried about being sniped. When providing security to their officers who are interviewing local men, the battalion’s soldiers often stand upright in prominent places, projecting their presence while watching over the countryside and village lanes. In areas where snipers have been successful or are abundant, troops generally do not do that.
Two different factors might explain the relative infrequency of attacks from Lee-Enfield rifles. The first could be ammunition availability. To date, the battalion has captured no British .303 ammunition in Ghazni Province, and without .303 ammunition, a Lee-Enfield rifle, whether an original or a knock-off, is no more use than a heavy club. By comparison, the contents of 15 recently captured Taliban Kalashnikov magazines, inventoried by the At War blog, revealed that the Taliban’s magazines were full with ammunition identical to that carried by the Afghan police. The Taliban and the Afghan police carry the same types and calibers of weapons. And with police ammunition evidently leaking to the insurgency, ammunition for AK rifles, PK machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades would seem in abundant supply, helping to limit the use of the Lee-Enfield line.
The second reason for the relative scarcity of bolt-action rifle attacks here may be related to a combination of American rules of engagement and the presence of more surveillance drones in the war. Under the rules, Afghans visibly carrying weapons are much more likely to become targets for American airstrikes and other attacks. And unlike the common folding-stock Kalashnikov line, which can be hidden within an Afghan man’s winter clothing, Lee-Enfield rifles are very difficult to conceal when running through villages and irrigation ditches or when riding a motorcycle – two typical ways that Taliban gunmen move about during a firefight. In the current conditions in which the Taliban must fight, carrying a Lee-Enfield in this area of Ghazni Province can mean assuming higher risk. A folding stock Kalashnikov, readily hidden, can allow a man to stand casually about and pretend to be a noncombatant when an aircraft or convoy passes by. Look at the photograph below, and another reason for the assault-rifle preference for waging war in such conditions is self-evident.
Uploaded with ImageShack.us
A final note for now: Mr. Ferguson, the curator, also helpfully gave a more precise identification of the aged rifle from Marja that a previous British researcher had called a Martini Henry rifle, and was the subject of a previous At War post. That rifle, he said, while it had a Martini action, was either a Martini-Enfield or another Khyber Pass special. At War will be sending the museum more photographs to help Mr. Ferguson try to pinpoint the rifle’s provenance. This will be one more step in an ongoing examination of the rifles of rural Afghanistan, the land, perhaps more than any other, of the gun, and where the adverse effects of the mass distribution of infantry arms to civilian populations are visible in every direction, every day.
Regards
P.S. Last line questionable on an otherwise nice read.
By C.J. CHIVERS
ORWARD OPERATING BASE ANDAR, Afghanistan — This month Tyler Hicks and I have been working alongside the soldiers of Task Force Iron, an infantry battalion from the 101st Airborne Division that soon will complete a one-year tour in Afghanistan. We’re busy editing photographs and wrapping up reporting on some of the operations we observed alongside American soldiers and Afghan police and intelligence officers, and will have at least two stories for the newspaper soon. As we work, we want to pause to share a fresh look at some of the Taliban’s weapons, based on the battalion’s recent captures from slain Taliban fighters or caches, as a means to understanding more fully how the Taliban fights.
Task Force Iron is what the military colloquially calls a “surge battalion” – one of the units dispatched to Afghanistan as part of the Obama administration’s campaign to subdue the Taliban insurgency and train Afghanistan’s national security forces to assume responsibility for the country’s security within a few years. The battalion spent much of its tour in Paktika Province. But since mid-September it has been working in the Andar and Deh Yak districts of eastern Ghazni Province, two agrarian areas near the storied city of Ghazni. These districts contain clusters of ancient villages on the high steppe, and they have had scant American presence since the war began in 2001. The battalion arrived to find the villages poor, largely disconnected from the central government and crowded with Taliban fighters, some of whom were eager to fight. (Those of you who follow English-language Afghan coverage closely will recall that this is the area where the journalist Nir Rosen, the author of Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America’s Wars in the Muslim World, reported firsthand for Rolling Stone on his brief travels with Taliban fighters in 2008.)
We’re working on a story about Taliban organization and tactics in this patch of countryside. But when we arrived, we found that the task force’s intelligence section and its commanding officer, Lt. Col. David G. Fivecoat, had been reading the At War blog, and had assembled data and set aside recently captured weapons for the blog’s readers. Their advance work allows us to update our Taliban Gun Locker post and present a local look at how a complex but financially limited insurgency equips itself to fight materially superior American and Afghan units.
First, the numbers: Between Nov. 27, 2010, and Jan. 20, 2011, the battalion captured 43 rifles, two PK machine guns, two RPK squad machine guns, 6 rocket-propelled grenade launchers, a shotgun, three pistols and an 82-millimeter mortar system. Of the rifles, 37 were Kalashnikov assault rifles of mixed vintage and varied provenance, five were Lee-Enfield bolt-action rifles and one was an SKS. This was a familiar mix for the current Afghan war. Most of the equipment was superficially in disrepair, but otherwise functional, although one of the Lee-Enfield rifles had a loose, freely moving stock and was in no condition for accurate shooting.
Within the assortment, two of these rifles were particularly eye-catching: a pair of apparent Short Magazine Lee Enfields, known among those who follow firearms evolution as S.M.L.E.’s, that were captured by the battalion’s B Company during a village sweep on Dec. 24. (I say apparent for a reason; more on that in a moment.)
We’ve seen aged Lee-Enfields in Afghan service in the past, and At War has written about their presence in Marja and their use by a better breed of Taliban marksmen in Helmand Province. We won’t repeat those posts here. You can go back and read them for insights into how the officially obsolete arms of old empires still find their way to war, and can be put to effective local use by insurgent cells.
In this case, the Lee-Enfield rifles captured in Ghazni Province allow the blog to examine the diversity – and the limits – of Taliban weapon supply, and to highlight a longstanding element of the Afghan firearms trade.
Why? Because although these rifles retained the distinct Lee-Enfield form, they were not quite right. Both bore unusual factory symbols. And one bore a date stamp of 1881 – a year that predated by more than two decades the period when Short Magazine Lee-Enfield rifles were manufactured for British military service. Spotting an 1881 SMLE was akin to seeing a Chevy Corvette accompanied by documents claiming that it had been assembled in the 1930s. In a nutshell, the date stamp was making an impossible claim. But there it was.
Uploaded with ImageShack.us
This led to the natural next step. We made photographs of the rifles’ markings and pushed them through the satellite connection to the e-mail address of a curator of the Royal Armouries Museum in the United Kingdom – perhaps the most readily accessible bank of knowledge on infantry rifles in the world. (Lee-Enfields were for several decades the standard infantry arms of British units and their colonial partners. They have been manufactured in several countries and have had a wide distribution, and due to their diverse markings an expert eye is at times required to trace one to its likely point of origin.) In this case, the curator at the arms museum, Jonathan Ferguson, swiftly solved the puzzle. There would be no tracing these rifles to conventional factories, because no conventional factories were involved. Task Force Iron had captured Pakistani knock-offs of the British empire’s former standard arm.
Here is part of Mr. Ferguson’s reply.
Both rifles would appear to be locally made copies, commonly known as “Khyber Pass” guns. The fit, finish, and form of individual parts are all “off,” but the dead giveaways on each are the markings. The first rifle bears a supposed manufacture date of 1881. The SMLE was not approved until 1902, the Mk.III* that this is purporting to be not until 1916! If this were a conversion of the old long Lee-Enfield or the original Lee-Metford this would be evident in the markings, and the mark number would be IV rather than III. This is all academic however, since even the original Lee-Metford was only approved in 1888 – seven years after this rifle was supposedly made!
The second rifle has a spurious Birmingham Small Arms Company mark (wrong size, uneven lettering) below a weird and wonderful logo of some kind – certainly not the BSA logo (two crossed rifles).
The gunsmiths of Pakistan are a famous phenomenon, and have been widely documented over the past decades. In a network of small shops and factories along Pakistan’s western frontier, local tradesmen have for generations produced handmade copies of well-established infantry arms, and helped keep Pashtun tribesmen supplied. Their weapons are available, along with original items (often pilfered from government units), in local bazaars. These weapons appear to be the product of this trade, although it is hard to tell by visual inspection when exactly they were made. They could have been produced a few years ago, or many decades back.
It’s worth noting a few items to put these rifles into local as well as historical context.
First, a point about the enduring utility to insurgents of small arms and light weapons: Based on Task Force Iron’s so-called “significant action” reports, automatic rifles, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades remain the pre-eminent weapons used by Taliban fighters in Ghazni. American soldiers here have been attacked by rifles and machine guns almost daily, while the use of improvised bombs and mortars are comparatively much less common. (A look at the wounding data from the battalion shows it aligns with consistent patterns in the war, with improvised bombs causing a larger volume of American wounds, but gunshot wounds proving to be more lethal to those who have the misfortune of being struck.) The Taliban’s small arms are also the tools with which the insurgents threaten local civilians, harass American patrols and generally maintain martial influence over the districts. Earlier this month, for example, the Taliban stopped the car of a local man who had provided information to the American infantry company in Deh Yak. He was taken from the vehicle, fatally shot, and left beside the dirt road.
Second, in this zone of frequent (and usually brief) small-arms attacks, the Lee-Enfield line has not been widely used. The officers in the battalion’s intelligence section said there had been only a few incidents of the single-shot, carefully aimed fire, compared to almost uncountable attacks by automatic arms fired in bursts at American patrols. This tactical fact is evident in the body language of the American soldiers on patrols. When snipers are about, troops quickly learn to mask their movements and reduce their exposure in subtle ways – by kneeling, crouching, remaining behind walls or constantly moving in erratic steps, a set of deliberate behaviors that can frustrate a watching sniper’s aim. The Americans here, however, often move confidently across the open. They are alert to the possibility of ambush, but not apparently worried about being sniped. When providing security to their officers who are interviewing local men, the battalion’s soldiers often stand upright in prominent places, projecting their presence while watching over the countryside and village lanes. In areas where snipers have been successful or are abundant, troops generally do not do that.
Two different factors might explain the relative infrequency of attacks from Lee-Enfield rifles. The first could be ammunition availability. To date, the battalion has captured no British .303 ammunition in Ghazni Province, and without .303 ammunition, a Lee-Enfield rifle, whether an original or a knock-off, is no more use than a heavy club. By comparison, the contents of 15 recently captured Taliban Kalashnikov magazines, inventoried by the At War blog, revealed that the Taliban’s magazines were full with ammunition identical to that carried by the Afghan police. The Taliban and the Afghan police carry the same types and calibers of weapons. And with police ammunition evidently leaking to the insurgency, ammunition for AK rifles, PK machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades would seem in abundant supply, helping to limit the use of the Lee-Enfield line.
The second reason for the relative scarcity of bolt-action rifle attacks here may be related to a combination of American rules of engagement and the presence of more surveillance drones in the war. Under the rules, Afghans visibly carrying weapons are much more likely to become targets for American airstrikes and other attacks. And unlike the common folding-stock Kalashnikov line, which can be hidden within an Afghan man’s winter clothing, Lee-Enfield rifles are very difficult to conceal when running through villages and irrigation ditches or when riding a motorcycle – two typical ways that Taliban gunmen move about during a firefight. In the current conditions in which the Taliban must fight, carrying a Lee-Enfield in this area of Ghazni Province can mean assuming higher risk. A folding stock Kalashnikov, readily hidden, can allow a man to stand casually about and pretend to be a noncombatant when an aircraft or convoy passes by. Look at the photograph below, and another reason for the assault-rifle preference for waging war in such conditions is self-evident.
Uploaded with ImageShack.us
A final note for now: Mr. Ferguson, the curator, also helpfully gave a more precise identification of the aged rifle from Marja that a previous British researcher had called a Martini Henry rifle, and was the subject of a previous At War post. That rifle, he said, while it had a Martini action, was either a Martini-Enfield or another Khyber Pass special. At War will be sending the museum more photographs to help Mr. Ferguson try to pinpoint the rifle’s provenance. This will be one more step in an ongoing examination of the rifles of rural Afghanistan, the land, perhaps more than any other, of the gun, and where the adverse effects of the mass distribution of infantry arms to civilian populations are visible in every direction, every day.
Regards
P.S. Last line questionable on an otherwise nice read.
Though in 1948 Indians were involved in smuggling brand new M1944 Mosin-Nagants through Afghanistan into the restive Pakistani Northwest tribal area.