Taleban waging war with ammunition from US forces

Arms and ordnance collected from dead insurgents hint at one possible reason: of 30 rifle magazines recently taken from insurgents' corpses, at least 17 contained cartridges, or rounds, identical to ammunition that the United States had provided to Afghan government forces.

The presence of this ammunition among the dead in the Qurangal Valley near the border with Pakistan, strongly suggests that munitions procured by the Pentagon have leaked from Afghan forces for use against US troops.

The scope of that diversion remains unknown, and the 30 magazines represented a single sampling of fewer than 1,000 cartridges. But military officials, arms analysts and dealers say it points to a worrisome possibility: with only partial US and Afghan controls on the vast inventory of weapons and ammunition sent into Afghanistan during an eight-year conflict, poor discipline and outright corruption among Afghan forces may have helped supply insurgents.

In this case, the rifle magazines were captured in April by a platoon in Company B, 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry, which killed at least 13 insurgents in a nighttime ambush in eastern Afghanistan. The soldiers searched the insurgents' remains and collected 10 rifles, a rocket-propelled-grenade launcher, 30 magazines and other equipment.

Access to Taleban equipment is unusual. But after the ambush, the company allowed the items to be examined by myself.

Photographs were taken of the weapons' serial numbers and markings on the bottoms of the cartridge casings, known as headstamps, which can reveal where and when ammunition was manufactured.

The headstamps were then compared with ammunition in government circulation, and with this reporter's records of ammunition sampled in Afghan magazines and bunkers in multiple provinces in recent years.

The type of ammunition in question, 7.62x39 mm, colloquially known as "7.62 short," is one of the world's most abundant classes of military small-arms cartridges, and can come from dozens of potential suppliers.

The examination of the Taleban's cartridges found telling signs: 17 of the magazines contained ammunition bearing either of two stamps – the word "WOLF" in uppercase letters, or the lowercase arrangement "bxn."

"WOLF" stamps mark ammunition from Wolf Performance Ammunition, a company in California that sells Russian-made cartridges to American gun owners. The company has also provided cartridges for Afghan soldiers and police officers, typically through middlemen.

The "bxn" marking was formerly used at a Czech factory during the Cold War. Since 2004, the Czech government has donated surplus ammunition and equipment to Afghanistan. AEY Inc., a former Pentagon supplier, also shipped surplus Czech ammunition to Afghanistan, according to the US Army, including cartridges bearing "bxn" stamps.

Most of the Wolf and Czech ammunition in the Taleban magazines was in good conditionsuggesting it had been removed from packaging recently.

There is no evidence that Wolf, the Czech government or AEY knowingly shipped ammunition to Afghan insurgents. AEY was banned last year from doing business with the Pentagon, but its legal troubles stemmed from unrelated allegations of fraud.

Given the number of potential sources, the probability that the Taleban and the Pentagon were sharing identical supply sources was small.

Rather, the concentration of Taleban ammunition identical in markings and condition to that used by Afghan units indicated that the munitions had most likely slipped from state custody, said James Bevan, a researcher specialising in ammunition for the Small Arms Survey, an independent research group in Geneva.

Bevan, who has documented so-called "ammunition diversion" in Kenya, Uganda and Sudan, said one likely explanation was that interpreters, soldiers or police officers had sold ammunition for profit or passed it along for other reasons, including support for the insurgency. The majority of cartridges in the remaining 13 Taleban magazines bore headstamps indicating they were made in Russia in the Soviet period.

Hungarian and Chinese ammunition had also been provided to the Afghan government by AEY, making it possible that several of the remaining magazines included American-procured rounds. The US military did not dispute the possibility that theft or corruption could have steered Wolf and Czech ammunition to insurgents.

Captured Taleban rifles provide a glimpse at arms diversion as well.

After the battle in the eastern village of Wanat last year, in which nine Americans died and more than 20 were wounded, investigators found a large cache of AMD-65 assault rifles in the village's police post, which was implicated in the attack, according to US officers.

The AMD-65, a distinctive Hungarian rifle, was rarely seen in Afghanistan until the United States issued it by the thousands to the Afghan police.

They can now be found in Pakistani arms bazaars.