Syria: Rebels Risk Own Lives Over DIY Weapons

By Sam Kiley, Middle East Correspondent, in northern Syria

High explosive powder is shaken into the nose cone of an improvised missile through a funnel fashioned from a mineral water bottle.

Then along comes a man with a long bolt. He shoves it down into the powder and starts whacking it with a steel-headed hammer.

One spark, a drift of cigarette ash, and the detonation of this arms factory would be heard and seen for many, many miles.

We agreed with our hosts, Syrian rebels with no connection to al Qaeda-linked groups, that we would not reveal the location of this installation. The reason was obvious.

For more than two years the rebels fighting Bashar al Assad had been begging the outside world for help.

They had seen how effective a no-fly zone had been in Libya.

Some of the extraordinary weapons being produced

A generous interpretation of a United Nations Security Council Resolution which mandated the use of "all necessary means" to protect Libya's civilian population had meant that Nato and her allies were able to deploy aircraft effectively as the rebel air force.

Surely, given the scale of Mr Assad's assault on his own people, the Syrian fighters reasoned, they would get the same sort of support their Libyan brothers had enjoyed. They were wrong.

The West, led by the US, was heavily focused on getting out of, not into, conflicts in the Islamic world. Namely Iraq and Afghanistan.

And there was no chance that Russia would allow a UN resolution that sanctioned the use of air power against its ally in Damascus.

So no no-fly zone and no weapons shipments - aside from limited supplies from Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

The rebels were forced to improvise, or die. Weapons had to be made if they could not be given, or captured.

This explosive device looked like a cartoon bomb

The factory we saw turned out some extraordinary weapons.

The most primitive was a "cannon" which ejected an explosive charge, made from a length of pipe stuffed with explosive which was detonated by a fuse that had to be lit with a match before being fired. It looked like a cartoon bomb.

A similar, smaller, contraption had been made from an old shotgun. The rebels make their explosive out of fertiliser and sugar.

Mortar barrels and rockets are turned on industrial lathes, using pipes bought from a builders' merchant.

The rocket detonators are hand turned. A worker dropped one last week, and paid for the mistake with his life.

"We have invested a lot of money and effort in trying to get better at this, some of us have been killed working here - one man died last week, and many have lost pieces of themselves," said Abu Yahya, the manager of the factory.

The weapons-makers are self-taught engineers

The US has recently decided to send lethal aid to the rebels - not game-changing equipment such as anti-aircraft weapons or tank-killing missiles - just small arms and rocket-propelled grenades.

These will be welcome - but they are the sort of thing that the rebels make for themselves.

The US is reluctant to send more powerful equipment because of fears that it could find its way into the hands of al Qaeda-affiliated groups which could then use anti-aircraft missiles to shoot down civilian aircraft.

Prime Minister David Cameron supports arming those rebels with no affiliations to al Qaeda - but whether he can sell the idea to Parliament remains in question.

Many British MPs do not believe that their national interests would be served by backing rebels who may turn against Europe.

But there remains another, more subtle, problem.

The arms factory we saw was a hive of innovation and improvisation. The self-taught engineers were making a remote-controlled rocket launcher out of plastic drainage pipes, the working parts of an adjustable TV satellite receiver and an old starter motor.

That level of artisanal arms manufacturing may, one day, pose a threat to the outside world from people who were abandoned by it.

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