Hezbollah has U.S. armored personnel carriers. But how did they get them?
Source: WaPo
Over the weekend images surfaced online of a Hezbollah parade in Qusair, Syria, featuring U.S. armored personnel carriers affixed with antiaircraft guns. The images prompted a flurry of speculation about the vehicles origin and whether the group had pilfered the stocks of the U.S.-supplied Lebanese military.
The armored personnel carrier, known as the M113, is one of the United States most ubiquitous armored vehicles and has been in service since the 1960s. The tracked semi-rhombus-shape vehicle comes in numerous variants and can be outfitted to carry troops and artillery; its chassis was even used as the basis for a nuclear-missile carrier. It has appeared in every major U.S. conflict since the Vietnam War andis used byU.S. police departments and dozens of others countries militaries around the world.
As a prominent political and military entity in Lebanon, Hezbollahs possession of the vehicles couldsupport the theory floated by the defense analyst Tobias Schneider, who tweeted that the personnel carrierswere probably taken from the Lebanese Armed Forces, a major recipient of U.S. military aid.
Over the summer, the Lebanese military took possession of dozens of pieces of artillery, armored vehicles,semiautomatic grenade launchers and 1,000 tons of ammunition all worth about 50 million as part of theUnited States ongoing efforts to bolster the countrys capacity to fight extremists. The shipment, overseen by the Pentagon and the State Department, brought the amount of U.S. military aid sent to Lebanon in 2016 to 221 million, according to U.S. Ambassador Elizabeth H. Richard.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2016/11/16/hezbollah-has-u-s-armored-personnel-carriers-but-how-did-they-get-them/
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