Syrian attack helicopters firing missiles during army maneuvers at an undisclosed location in Syria.
By C. J. CHIVERS
With diplomatic efforts dead and the future of Syria playing out on the battlefield, many of the Syrian government’s most powerful weapons, including helicopter gunships, fighter jets and tanks, are looking less potent and in some cases like a liability for the military of President Bashar al-Assad.
Rebels have turned part of Mr. Assad’s formidable arsenal on his own troops. Anti-Assad fighters on Wednesday shelled a military airport in the contested city of Aleppo with captured weapons. On Tuesday, rebels used commandeered Syrian Army tanks in a skirmish with Mr. Assad’s troops.
Perhaps even more worrying to Mr. Assad, his military has come to rely more heavily on equipment designed for a major battle with a foreign enemy, namely Israel, rather than a protracted civil conflict with his own people. Close observers of his military say Syria is having trouble keeping its sophisticated and maintenance-intensive weapons functioning.
The strain is likely to grow more acute as the government depends on helicopter gunships to extend its reach to parts of the country rendered impassable to logistics convoys and even armored vehicles by the rebels’ improvised bombs.
Analysts said Syria’s fleet of Mi-25 Hind-D attack helicopters, which numbered 36 at the start of the conflict, is insufficient to hold back rebels as the number of fronts, from Aleppo and Idlib in the north to the suburbs of Damascus in the south and Hama and Homs in the center of the country, continues to proliferate.
Maintenance technicians are struggling to keep the machines aloft in an intense campaign and in the searing heat and sand associated with summer desert war. Estimates are that only half his fleet can be used at a given time, with some helicopters cannibalized for spare parts and Mr. Assad dependent on supplies from Russia.
“This army is going to start breaking,” said Jeffrey White, a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst now studying Syria for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Not the whole thing at once, but pieces of it will break.”
Mr. White said that by his estimates the Syrian military suffered nearly 1,100 soldiers killed in July, and is losing more soldiers and officers to defections. The loyalties of many commanders and units are suspect, he added, and months of sustained combat are no doubt taking a heavy toll on tanks and aircraft in a military that he said “was never known for maintenance.”
Defections of government troops and seizures of armaments are also a growing problem. Rebels in Aleppo claim to have control of a total of 14 T-72 and T-55 tanks and many indirect-fire weapons, including artillery pieces as well as mortars.
“The tanks are driven by our members, and their specialty is driving tanks, that’s what they did before they defected,” said Bashir al-Haji, a Free Syrian Army commander in Aleppo. “The tanks and artillery are important in our fight because they enable us to shell the regime from a distance.”
More potent arms for the rebels and the strain on helicopters may help explain why the Syrian military recently began using L-39 trainer jets in and around Aleppo, Syria’s most heavily populated city.
Another explanation for the appearance of jets “is that the Syrian military is fighting for Aleppo without enough artillery tubes,” said Joseph Holliday, a former American intelligence officer who covers the war for the Institute for the Study of War, in Washington.
At a glance, and for now, the government’s helicopter fleet is an imposing force. Highly maneuverable and able to carry several types of munitions, including free-fall bombs, it allows Mr. Assad’s military to roam above the Syrian countryside, seeking targets beyond the ready reach of its ground units.
Rebel commanders routinely say that what they most need are antiaircraft weapons to thwart government aircraft, especially helicopters.
But even if the rebels have no missiles these aircraft are almost certainly a dwindling asset, arms specialists who follow the Syrian conflict say. An American government official who covers the war said that fewer than 20 of these aircraft were likely available to the Assad government on any given day, out of the 36 in the fleet.
Mr. Holliday, the former American intelligence officer, put the estimate of working Hind-Ds even lower. “Assessing a max of 15 operational,” he wrote by e-mail.
As backup attack gunships, Syria possesses a similarly sized fleet of Gazelle helicopters, a platform more suited for attacking armor than foot-mobile guerrillas, and a much larger fleet of Mi-8 and Mi-17 utility helicopters, another Russian-made design.
Open-source estimates indicate Syria began its crackdown with 100 Mi-8s or Mi-17s, along with more than 30 Gazelles.
Robert Hewson, a specialist in air-launched weapons at IHS Jane’s, noted that the pylons on the Mi-8 and Mi-17 helicopters can be fitted with many of the same Russian-made weapons carried by the Mi-25, including one of the most powerful pieces of ordnance that have been verified thus far in the conflict: 550-pound OFAB free-fall bombs.
Taken together, Syria’s helicopters have been used in attacks with high-explosive rockets fired from pods, in the release of unguided bombs like the OFAB and possibly in at least one cluster-munitions strike. These are weapons commonly associated, in the public’s mind, with fixed-wing attack aircraft, including Syria’s MIG 23s.
But the Mi-8 and Mi-17 helicopters have many other missions. By early summer, rebel commanders and Western analysts said, many Syrian units were largely confined to their garrisons. Some, as in Azaz, had been principally resupplied by these utility helicopters — a mission that demanded many flight hours and diverted aircraft from ground-attack roles.
Mr. Holliday said that perhaps 60 of those helicopters were still in full-time service.
Two wild cards remain in the air-to-ground element of the conflict. First, the analysts said, was the meaning of the recent use of Syria’s ground-attack jets. This introduced a delivery system with a heavy payload and the ability to frighten inexperienced guerrillas with low-level passes.
But that can be read as both an incremental move intended to increase the pressure on antigovernment forces and an indication that Syria’s helicopter squadrons are less robust than even several weeks ago.
If so, like the increased use of helicopters earlier this year as the anti-Assad fighters’ effective use of makeshift bombs spiked sharply upward, it could be a sign that the Syrian military has fewer combat tools at its disposal than before, and fewer options for pushing its foes back.
That could augur a larger future role for Syria’s fixed-wing fleet.
The second wild card lies in the rebels’ acquisition of more weapons able to down aircraft, especially helicopters. In an interview last month, a Syrian Mi-17 pilot who had defected said that through June he and his peers did not worry about the anti-Assad forces, often referred to as the Free Syrian Army, possessing heat-seeking, shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles.
The principal worry, he said, was fire from RPG-7s, a shoulder-fired anti-armor weapon that at short ranges can be effective against helicopters, too. (Such a system was used last August, American military officials said, to down an American Chinook helicopter in Afghanistan, killing all 38 people aboard.)
“We knew that the Free Syrian Army didn’t have antiaircraft missiles,” he said. “So we flew at an elevation higher than kilometer — above the RPGs.”
In recent weeks there have been indications that the anti-Assad fighters are creeping toward posing greater risks to the government helicopters.
One video, which analysts said was credible, showed a fighting group in Rastan with what appeared to be two-thirds of an SA-7 shoulder-fired, heat-seeking missile system. NBC News reported this week that unnamed anti-Assad sources claimed to have obtained as many as two dozen heat-seeking missiles via transit through Turkey. The claim has since been denied by other opposition members, though the American government official said that there were indications that rebels had apparently captured more SA-7 missile tubes and batteries from Syrian government stocks. The official added that as yet the essential grip stock required to fire the weapon had not been seen.
With the question of whether the anti-Assad forces have obtained functional antiaircraft missile systems still unsettled, another question is not.
Many videos have shown fighting groups with what appears to be a growing number of captured 12.7-millimeter, 14.5-millimeter and 23-millimeter machine guns — all of which can be lethal to helicopters, and show the risks to Mr. Assad, whose own weapons have been increasingly turned against the forces that secure his fate.
A version of this military analysis appeared in print on August 3, 2012, on page A1 of the National edition with the headline: Assad’s Arms Under Strain.
NYT
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