Syria’s barrels of death
BEIRUT, Lebanon (AP) — They are known as barrel bombs — makeshift, shrapnel-packed explosive devices that Syrian forces have been dropping on rebel-held neighbourhoods from helicopters. Residents have another name for them: “barrels of death”.
It’s a crude term for a crude weapon.
For nearly two months, President Bashar Assad’s government has conducted an intensive air campaign against parts of the northern city of Aleppo. Over the past six days alone, the airstrikes have killed at least 250 people, according to activists. At the same time, the military has stepped up air raids on the Damascus suburb of Daraya.
Activists say the vast majority of the attacks have been conducted with barrel bombs.
The term barrel bombs is a bit of a misnomer, though, but it arose when these weapons were first used in mid-2012, and it has stuck. They are containers — old oil drums, barrels, storage tanks, welded metal cylinders — that have been packed with hundreds of kilogrammes (pounds) of explosives, fuel and scrap metal, such as ball bearings, nails, saw blades or bits of rebar.
They are then loaded onto Syrian military helicopters and pushed out of the rear door. They have no guidance mechanism, so they just tumble through the sky and explode wherever they land.
The bombs have evolved since the Syrian Government first started employing them.
The Syrians tinkered with the design and now build them with impact trigger mechanisms and tailfins to improve their reliability.
And in the past six to eight weeks, Higgins said, they appear to have settled on a more uniform design: a large metal cylinder around 3 feet wide and 6 feet tall (2 metres by 3 metres). In some cases, these are packed with up to 2,000 pounds of explosives, according to an analysis by weapons expert Richard M Lloyd posted on the Brown Moses Blog.
The use of these weapons has drawn sharp criticism from the US, its allies, and human rights groups. “It’s a rudimentary bomb that, in the way the Syrian government is using it, is inherently indiscriminate,” said Lama Fakih, a Syria researcher with Human Rights Watch.
The Syrian Government has not publicly addressed its reliance on barrel bombs. Some observers have suggested that their increasing use indicates Assad’s air force is running low on traditional ordnance. But the Syrian military can still count on a steady supply of standard munitions from its allies, Russia and Iran, which would undercut that theory.
Another theory, this one put forward by Higgins, is that these weapons provide an effective way for the military to use its transport helicopters in an attack capacity.
The bombs have had a devastating effect. Videos posted online show buildings smashed into heaps of shattered concrete blocks, twisted rebar and metal sheeting. One strike devastated a vegetable market in Aleppo, leaving apocalyptic images in its wake: bodies torn in half by shrapnel, market stalls ablaze, a cloud of smoke and dust hovering over the scene.