Wings Over Iraq

cjchivers:

Somali pirates surrendering, in green tint, to a U.S. Navy helicopter from the U.S.S. John C. Stennis after trying to hijack the motor vessel Sunshine in the Gulf of Oman. The pirates later admitted that they had tossed their weapons over the side as the helicopter, an MH-60, flew near. This frame was made off the helicopter’s video feed, as that day was beginning to accelerate, minutes after the Somalis jettisoned their arms with hopes they would not be detained.

So what kind of weapons did the pirates carry? And from where did these weapons come? Later in the sequence that followed throughout that day and into the next, Tyler Hicks and I had a chance to look over the weapons carried by these pirates’ fellow travelers on the fishing vessel Al Mulahi, the Iranian dhow they had commandeered and used as their mother ship. There were five firearms, four of which were unsurprising. But one of the assault rifles, briefly mentioned here yesterday, was chambered for NATO-standard 5.56-millimeter ammunition, and of provenance worth a pause for further research.

The previous post asked for readers to venture a guess as to what it might have been. The volume of answers — via email and Twitter — caught me off guard. A lot of you obviously care about these things. And many of you guessed exactly as I would have: an AK-101, an M4, an M16, a Galil, an HK33.  

But no one nailed it. Don’t be disappointed or surprised by this. The rifle in question was not a typical find or a widely distributed and well-known pattern. And those who wondered whether a rifle taken from an American serviceman killed in Somalia had ended up on Al Mulahi can rest easy. The rifle in question did not have a history as U.S.-issue. But that line of thinking was the right line of thinking, as the weapon’s conventional army history is actually quite interesting. We’ll get to that very soon.

Why? Because even though our original plan was to post something of it on Friday, news intervened. And with our colleagues Jeffrey Gettleman, Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker busily filing today on the overnight Navy S.E.A.L. rescue of two hostages in Somalia, we decided to change the order of this week’s work. The Somali Pirate Gun Locker post for the At War blog is now on the desk. It should go live tonight, to complement the work of Jeff, Eric and Thom.

I will post more soon, very soon, including details re the photo of the token prize (see that watch?) I had intended to mail to whomever guessed right. Don’t worry, the prize was nothing special. And I will find another way to pass it to a reader, I hope, in the not-too-distant future. The Somali-rifle question was a quiz designed for kicks, and to see whether the assault rifle in question had much history in the public discourse. It didn’t. But in a few days we will ask readers another question. And this time it will be because we need help identifying a weapon that, try as we may, we have not been able to trace. Crowd-sourcing, here we come.

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