Arab nations and Turkey, helped by the US Central Intelligence Agency, have dramatically increased military aid to Syrian rebels in recent months, ‘The New York Times’ reported yesterday.
The CIA was helping their efforts, the newspaper added, citing air traffic data and interviews with unnamed officials and the rebel commanders.
The airlift has grown to include more than 160 military cargo flights landing at Esenboga Airport near Ankara, and at other Turkish and Jordanian airports, the report said.
US intelligence officers have helped the Arab governments shop for weapons, including a large procurement from Croatia, it said. They had also vetted rebel commanders and groups to determine who should receive the weapons as they arrive.
Turkey had overseen much of the programme, fixing transponders to trucks ferrying the military goods through Turkey so it could monitor shipments, the paper added.
“A conservative estimate of the payload of these flights would be 3,500 tonnes of military equipment,” Hugh Griffiths, of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), told the paper.
“The intensity and frequency of these flights,” were “suggestive of a well-planned and co-ordinated clandestine military logistics operation”, he added.
The armed uprising against the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad sprang up in response to the Damascus regime’s crackdown two years ago on opposition protests.