Syria’s Risky Arms Race

This weapon is perfect for close-quarters combat, house to house,” the Russian arms dealer explains, handing a silencer-equipped AK-104 assault rifle to a Syrian official, who brings the gun’s sight to his eye and aims it across Pavilion C3 of Russia’s biennial arms bazaar. Through the crosshairs, he can see the neon display of Rosoboronexport, Russia’s state weapons dealer, which has given the Syrians a rare chance to do some military shopping. Most of the world has banned arms sales to the Syrian government amid the country’s escalating civil revolt. So in Moscow the four-member Syrian delegation is enjoying the hospitality. After an hour with the Kalashnikov salesman, the Syrians stroll over to study some rocket launchers, cruise missiles and military SUVs, which gleam in the summer sun like sports cars at a dealership.

Welcome to Russia’s premier weapons expo, the innocuously named Forum of Technologies in Machine Building, a military buffet that President Vladimir Putin, who was then Prime Minister, inaugurated two years ago. In the last week of June, delegations from 103 nations, including Iran, Zimbabwe, Pakistan and Uganda, descended on Zhukovsky Airfield near Moscow to attend the expo. One noteworthy attraction: a “ballet” of twirling, smoke-belching tanks staged by a choreographer from the Bolshoi Theatre.

(PHOTOS: The Syrian Arms Race)

But the Syrians were not there to be entertained. Over the past 16 months, Syrian forces loyal to President Bashar Assad have used their Russian weaponry to hammer a homegrown rebellion, the most violent of the Arab Spring revolts. The U.N. estimates the death toll at more than 10,000, including thousands of women and children. And as Syria falls deeper into disarray, Assad’s regime has continued to import Russian weaponry as part of long-standing deals between the two countries. According to CAST, a Russian military think tank with ties to the Ministry of Defense, there are now about $4 billion in open weapons contracts between Russia and Syria, and even though Moscow has pledged not to sign any new deals with Damascus until the war ends, its existing agreements “will not be affected in any way,” Anatoly Isaykin, the head of Rosoboronexport, tells TIME.

On the opposite side of the conflict, the disparate bands of rebels fighting to oust Assad are also receiving arms from abroad, making the Syrian crisis seem to many observers like a proxy conflict whose lines of patronage stretch not only to Moscow but across the Arab world and all the way to Washington. Russia, the U.S. and Europe all have major stakes in the Syrian struggle, as does almost every religious sect and ethnic clan in the Middle East, and they are all lining up behind one side or another. But with none of the foreign players willing to commit troops, the means of engagement has been through an arms race. For the West and its Arab allies, supporting the rebels is a low-risk way to even out the battlefield just long enough to persuade Assad to step down. For Russia and Iran, Assad’s most powerful supporters, this tactic smacks of violent regime change.

The stalemate has allowed more weapons to flow into Syria — increasing the chances that this bloody internal conflict will morph into a full-scale civil war, with regional and international forces backing opposing sides. “This is a proxy war,” Sergei Ordzhonikidze, a Russian diplomat, told TIME after returning to Moscow from Damascus in July. It harks back to the tradition of Cold War détente, he says, when the nuclear superpowers “avoided direct confrontation while advancing their interests through third countries.”

U.S. officials reject the notion that the U.S. is involved in a conflict with Russia in Syria. Washington is moving more subtly than its old Cold War adversary. In the past few months, the U.S. State Department has worked to establish relationships with opposition groups and is planning to open an office in Istanbul to vet them for possible ties to al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups, Administration and congressional sources say. On July 6, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pledged not to leave the rebel fighters hanging, even if the U.S. continues to avoid direct arms sales, let alone military intervention. “The United States will continue providing nonlethal assistance to help those inside Syria who are carrying the fight,” she said at a meeting on the crisis in Paris. That assistance has included communications equipment and training. Meanwhile, countries such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are providing weapons or funds for them, U.S. sources say. An official at the Saudi embassy in Washington declined to comment; officials from the Qatari and Emirati embassies did not respond to repeated requests for comment. No government has openly acknowledged supplying the rebels with weapons.

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Moscow’s Firepower
As the main weapons supplier to Damascus, Moscow has unmatched leverage with the Syrian regime. Syria has been a Kremlin client state since the 1970s, and apart from Iran, Russia is the only power that may be able to persuade Assad to step down. As international pressure mounts, Russia has shown new signs of impatience with the Syrian despot. On July 9, at a summit in Moscow with his entire ambassador corps, Putin ordered the diplomats to “do as much as possible to force the conflicting sides to reach a peaceful political solution.” The same day, a delegation of Syrian revolutionaries arrived in Moscow for talks with the Foreign Minister, signaling that Moscow may have started looking for partners among the opposition, perhaps to retain influence with a post-Assad government. The Russians “have indicated for some time now that they are not invested in Assad specifically but rather are concerned about an outcome that maintains stability in Syria,” says Ben Rhodes, President Obama’s Deputy National Security Adviser. “They certainly have not closed the door to a political transition from Assad. The hurdle for them has been understanding and appreciating that there’s no way to achieve stability with Assad still in power, and that’s what we’ve been trying to convince them of in our conversations.”

But at the weapons bazaar there was little sign that Russia intends to use its power in the arms trade to pressure Assad. “These are the guys we are rooting for,” an official with Rosoboronexport told TIME while showing the Syrian delegates a set of truck-mounted rocket launchers. The Syrians climbed into armored trucks, studied surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) and discussed certain weapons systems at length with Rosoboronexport reps. But their chaperone, Colonel Isam Ibrahim As’saadi, the military attaché at the Syrian embassy in Moscow, declined to say what, if anything, they purchased that day, nor did he allow TIME to speak with them. The man As’saadi identified as the head of the delegation would say only that he had flown in from Damascus to attend the fair. “That shows a serious intention to buy,” says Hugh Griffiths, an arms-trafficking expert at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), which tracks the global weapons market.

(PHOTOS: As Syria Grieves: Photographs by Nicole Tung)

In recent years the Syrians have become increasingly good customers. According to SIPRI, which gets its data on the arms trade from open sources, Syria increased its arms purchases almost sixfold over the past five years, and at least 78% of those weapons came from Russia, the world’s second largest arms dealer, after the U.S. This included deliveries of MiG-29 fighter jets, Pantsir-S1 rocket systems and Buk-M2E SAMs. “These are deterrents,” says Griffiths. “They would make any foreign intervention in Syria a lot more costly.”

They are also driving the rebels’ rush to seek heavy weaponry of their own.

Stoking the Inferno
Just across the border from Syria, along a desolate stretch of the Mediterranean coast, one of North Lebanon’s leading arms traffickers runs his business out of what looks like a repurposed seafood restaurant. Metal shutters are pulled down over the large plate-glass windows, and an empty aquarium embedded in the floor is growing lush with algae. Outside, half a dozen heavyset men dressed in identical khaki vests patrol the parking lot with walkie-talkies in their hands and pistols peeking out of their waistbands.

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Inside, Abu Saddam, who uses a nom de guerre, has just gotten off the phone. About two hours ago, he says, he sent a big shipment to Syria. What kind? “Painkillers,” he says, cocking an imaginary gun to his head. He refuses to say what type of weapons they were. But when asked whether they were for the Free Syrian Army, the loose confederation of military defectors and revolutionaries fighting Assad, Abu Saddam rolls his eyes. “Naturally,” he says. “The FSA is like hell. The more you put fire into it, the more it asks for.”

Over the past couple of months, he says, he has shipped several million dollars’ worth of heavy weapons to Syria. At the beginning of the conflict, the FSA, which Abu Saddam and other sources say is funded by wealthy Saudi, Qatari, Emirati and Syrian individuals, among others, was buying anything it could get, including pistols and grenades. Now they want bigger things. “They want thermals,” says Abu Saddam, meaning heat-seeking missiles. Something that could take out an airplane or a tank, like a SAM, would go for about $2,500, and he could get it “within five minutes.” To prove the point, he tells one of his khaki-vested minions to open an armored metal door tucked behind a tattered curtain. His employee pulls out a couple of mortar rounds, then some SAMs.

All of them are sourced from Libya, he says. “You could not imagine the quantities they have,” says Abu Saddam. The wiser heads among the sometimes fractious Libyan brigades that fought in that country’s revolution want to ship the weapons out, he explains, before their postrevolutionary battles get any bloodier. The Libyans even help load the weapons onto cargo ships headed for Lebanon, Abu Saddam says. The ships fly French, Russian or U.S. flags, anything but Libyan, and the manifests are doctored to read wood, ceramics or sheet metal, anything but guns.

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Among the nonstate actors contributing to the Syrian arms race are Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, which has been among the most active in supporting the rebels, sometimes in exchange for loyalty. Molham Aldrobi, an executive member of the Muslim Brotherhood and a founding member of the Syrian National Council, says his organization has been providing “all kinds of support,” from logistics and financial aid to weapons. “We’re trying to get anything that is more efficient and more effective in this struggle against Bashar,” Aldrobi tells TIME from Jidda, Saudi Arabia.

In the Russian analysis, the West is trying to control the flow of arms to the rebels, primarily through its Sunni allies, like Turkey and the Gulf states. “Surely you don’t think a tiny state like Qatar is acting alone in all this,” scoffs Ordzhonikidze, the Russian diplomat. The motivations for the West are simple, he suggests. For Europe, the goal is regime change so that an oil pipeline can be built from the Gulf to the Mediterranean. For the U.S., as ever, the prize is Iran, which would be isolated if its only major ally in the Middle East fell. Whether or not this intelligence is accurate, it is considered so by Russia’s leader, and that makes it hard for them to stay on the sidelines while, in their eyes, the West carves up another region of the world.

(PHOTOS: Syria’s Year of Chaos: Images of a Slow-Motion Civil War)

Syria is also home to tens of thousands of Russians, a legacy of the cultural and scientific exchanges that began in 1963, when the socialist Baath Party came to power. Soon after, Syria became a Soviet client state under the rule of Hafez Assad, Bashar Assad’s father. A legacy of that relationship is Russia’s naval base in the Syrian port of Tartus, the only military base Russia has left outside the former Soviet Union. On July 10, the Russian Ministry of Defense said it had sent a flotilla of warships for exercises near Tartus, the largest show of force in the region since the conflict in Syria began. “If we lose Tartus, we can kiss our foothold in that region goodbye,” says Konstantin Sivkov, a Russian military strategist who once served as a naval commodore in Tartus. “The entire Mediterranean would be surrounded by NATO, and we cannot let that happen.”

The Next War?
The longer Russia continues defending Syria, however, the greater international pressure Russia comes under. In July, Clinton said the world should make Moscow “pay a price” for standing by Assad — and the frequent reports of Syrian troops torturing and massacring civilians are regularly thrown in Russia’s face. This presents an image problem, says Rosoboronexport’s Isaykin. “Around these hot spots, efforts are made to present our organization as some kind of evil genius who is trying to pour kerosene on the fire,” he tells TIME at the Moscow arms bazaar, which his company helped organize and sponsor.

In April, Human Rights Watch informed Isaykin in an open letter that Assad’s use of Russian arms puts his firm “at a high risk of complicity” in war crimes. The independent watchdog later urged a global boycott of Rosoboronexport. Isaykin describes the attempts to blacken his company’s name as unfair competition on the part of his Western counterparts. “Of course I mean competition in the broadest sense of the word,” he says. “It always existed, and it will continue to exist.” So his orders from the government thus far are to soldier on. He says Rosoboronexport has every intention of fulfilling its multibillion-dollar contracts with the Syrian government as long as Assad can pay the bills. “None of these events will influence our relationships with our traditional markets in any way,” Isaykin says.

(PHOTOS: The Victims of Assad)

But Russia’s decision to meet with Syrian opposition leaders in Moscow may indicate that Russia is seeking to ensure its foothold in Syria well after a possible Assad ouster. “We are not married to Assad,” explains Sivkov. “We can maintain our position in Syria as long as there is a normal succession process.” Russia’s arms contracts with Syria require the two countries to maintain stable relations so that the weapons can be installed, serviced and repaired. Russia usually provides ammunition, technical support and training for the lifetimes of the weapons it sells. So unless the post-Assad government wants to replace its entire military infrastructure, it will not be able to sever ties with Russia.

That relationship would come to an end, says Sivkov, if the West insists on uprooting Assad’s regime completely. “That would spark a total war,” he says. The Alawites — the offshoot of Shi’ism that the Assads belong to and gain much of their support from — would be at risk of persecution at the hands of the majority Sunnis, Iran could be dragged in, oil prices could spike and the region would be in danger of dissolving into a sectarian quagmire.

Part of the reason the West has not been willing to give the rebels heavy artillery is that if Assad is overthrown, “it’s going to be ugly,” says Joseph Holliday, a Syria expert at the Institute for the Study of War in Washington. “No one really wants to precipitate a war right now. For those reasons you’ll see a continued proxy conflict — the Gulf states vs. Russia and Iran, and the U.S. trying to play referee.”

So until all sides can agree on a better option, the arms race in Syria is likely to continue — for this war and, perhaps even more worrying, for one yet to start. Abu Saddam, the Lebanese arms dealer, says his clients in Syria are stockpiling weapons not as much to overthrow Assad as to prepare for the carnage that his downfall would initiate. “That will be the real battle,” he says. “The FSA will want to take control, the Salafists will want to take control, the Muslim Brotherhood will want to take control, and the CIA, the Saudis and the KGB will want a say in what happens. Libya and Iraq? They will be nothing compared to what will happen in Syria once Bashar falls.”

—with reporting by Aryn Baker and Rami Aysha / Beirut, Rania Abouzeid / Turkish-Syrian Border and Jay Newton-Small / Washington

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