Friday 18 January 2013

More Information On The Equipment Looted From Taftanaz Air Base

Since the opposition capture of Taftanaz air base I've been trying to gather information on exactly what equipment was captured at the air base. This video from Ahrar al-Sham, a loose collection of Islamist and Salafist opposition groups, showing the attack on the base provides some more information


Two sections are of particular interesting, first of all at this point in the video we see what looks like at least a dozen UB-16-57UMP S-5 rocket pods stacked up in a warehouse


S-5 rocket pods featured heavily in the Libyan Civil War, frequently welded to the back of trucks and used as rocket artillery.  So far in Syria there's only been a few rare examples, including one welded to the back of a military truck in Taftanaz air base and used by the defenders, shown at the bottom of my earlier post on Taftanaz air base.

Of course, rocket launchers aren't much use without rockets, so later on in the video we see another warehouse filled with crates.  Unfortunately we don't get a good look at the crate marking, and only a brief look at a couple of rockets stacked on one of the crates, but what we do get a good look at this


What we have here is the warehouse stock list, titled "Aerial Munitions Available in Storage # 6".  The three columns with text in are, from left to right, the available stock, the description, and a sequential number.  The description includes Cyrillic descriptions of the items, and the list states the following items are in stock (thanks to Omar for translation)
1 - 3743 - S-5KO unguided rocket
2 - 3228 - S-5KP unguided rocket
3 - 3669 - V-5K fuze for armoured piercing rocket
4 - 115 - V-5M1 fuze for armoured piercing rocket
5 - 722 - Flare - Red Star
6 - 469 - Flare - White Star
7 - 680 - Flare - Green Star
8 - 564 - Flare - Yellow Star
9 - 949 - PPZ Fire suppressing round
The S-5KO and S-5KP are both types of rockets for the previously shown UB-16-57UMP rocket pods, and the V-5K and V-5KM1 are fuzes for S-5 rockets, more details of which can be found here.  While it's hard to know how up to date the warehouse stock list is does seem to indicate that the piles of crates in that warehouse do still contains various types of S-5 rockets, maybe thousands of them, so I fully expect members of Ahrar al-Sha, Jabhat al-Nusra, and other groups involved with the attack to be welding rocket pods to the back of truck and using them as artillery in the future.



2 comments:

  1. This vid claims to capture the impact of a tactical ballistic missile.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Y3n2AN8V6zY

    Any idea what weapon system it is?

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