#Iraq

In the early 80s, Iraq Military Industry was quite impressive for a Middle Eastern country. With the help of Yugoslavia, the country produced several different AK-pattern rifles, light machine guns, and various sniper rifles.

The hungriest beast of them all on this blog is our Photo Of The Day. It consumes hundreds of images every month, and it has been doing so for over 9 years. Today we offer a bunch of images from the Al Asad Air Base, in Iraq. This military airbase is located in the western Iraqi province of Al Anbar. It is situated approximately 180 kilometers west of the capital city of Baghdad and 10 kilometers south of the town of Baghdadi. The airbase is named after the nearby town of Al Asad.

In Part One of this article, I shared my experiences after visiting gun stores in Baghdad, and it is not what most people expect to see in Iraq. Gun stores are small and cramped, with a relatively limited choice of firearms and really high prices. Thankfully, things in Iraqi Kurdistan are way different.

More than once, when I argued about gun control with different people, I heard the same argument: “If you want to have your precious “assault weapons” – go live in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Somalia, they have no gun laws, you’ll be happy there owning your silly weapons of war”. However, after working in those places for a while, I realized that all of the above-mentioned countries have extremely restrictive gun laws. And Iraq is perhaps the best example of that.

Longtime readers of TFB will know our very own Vladimir Onokoy as not only a very competent writer but also an insightful specialist on non-American weaponry from various countries including Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and 12 other countries, mostly as a security contractor. Vlad likes to train, shoot competitively and has also been published in various print firearms magazines as a featured author and has also worked on several online video series with personalities like Larry Vickers. You can reach Vlad through TFB as well as his various social media outlets listed below.

The Baghdad is a little known about rifle that is still extremely rare to come across both in the United States and even in Iraq. There are definitely more questions than answers when it comes to what we actually know about the rifle:
It appears to have been built using the same machines and tooling as the Rasheed carbine production line. The ‘machine chatter’ as Scott mentions
The rifle has stamped years of production from 1969 to 1977.
There are a number of Egyptian Rasheed carbines that have Baghdad safety toggle blocks.
Differences between the Baghdad and the Rasheed are the buttplate cleaning kit cavity, apparently a slightly different choice of wood for the stock.
Some of the stamping font has been different from rifle years, other times instead of showing an Iraqi acceptance mark there is an eagle of Saladin.

When Skynet takes over, the Battelle Drone Defender V2 may become your best friend. Our Photo Of The Day shows U.S. Marines as they operate the Battelle V2 during a training at the Baghdad Embassy. The Marines are assigned to the Special Purpose Marine-Air Ground Task Force – Crisis Response – Central Command. The V2 can defend the airspace from drones and UAVs at ranges up to 400 meters, using remote control and GPS disruption. Note the red dot.

The camera loves the light, and in Iraq there’s plenty of sunshine. Today we look at a Danish soldier, scanning his sector of fire during a base defense exercise supporting Operation Task Force Dragon at Al Asad Air Base, Iraq.

Looking for moments when a great photographer meets some of the best Military Special Forces? Look no further, TFB’s daily articles are where you will find these amazing masterpieces.

The 9mm Tariq is unique among Beretta enthusiasts because of its scarcity outside of Iraq. It is certainly one of the least studied due to the lack of primary sources and information in the firearms research community. But we try to take a crack at breaking down the Tariq’s history and symbolism behind topics like who it is named after, variations in the production models, and how it is used today on the Iraqi market. There were even “Gift” Tariq handguns that were presented to the families of Iraqi soldiers killed in the Iran-Iraq War.

Smile! Wait for flash!

Photos where the photographer manages to capture the projectile as it leaves the barrel are the best, we love them! As you can see we have a contender in this Photo Of The Day, where a 120 mm mortar round leaves the barrel of the M74 Mortar.

TFB TV takes a look at one of the famous gun shops in Erbil, a city in northern Iraq. Wasta Bakhtiar has had his gunsmithing business for a number of years, starting in his own father’s shop as a child in Kurdistan. Today he fixes both Peshmerga and civilian small arms alike, sometimes even traveling to the frontlines against Daesh when the fighting was active.

About a month ago, Iraqi police seized over one thousand Ukrainian Fort-19 pistols that were smuggled into the country. Reportedly, the documents accompanying the cargo and the markings on the boxes were stating that the articles inside the container are bicycles. The seizure took place in Umm Qasr, a port city in southern Iraq.

In fact, it isn’t an M249 SAW at all.  It looks like a SAW, probably sounds like a SAW when fired, operates similarly to a SAW, but it isn’t one. What you are actually looking at is an RPD derivative that has been externally modified to fit the overall external profile of an M249 SAW light machine gun. The photographs were posted by the Instagram user Akalphonso who spotted them in use by an Iraqi Shi’a militia group named سرايا السلام‎/Sarea-Al-Salaam, or “Peace Companies” in English. The group is an organized self-defence force that was created at the height of the Daesh resurgence in Iraq and Syria, to protect vulnerable Shi’a communities in Iraq. Looking through the social media of the group, one sees numerous other small arms modifications that were done to make the weapons “look” like more effective small arms that they actually aren’t. One particularly gruesome example is of a PSL rifle that has been configured to “look” like a PKM GPMG from afar, complete with an M249 200 round plastic drum “attached” to the magazine well and the belt draped over the receiver of the rifle. This sort of practice has been going on in Iraq for some time, previously even among actual Iraqi special operations forces with Mad Bull airsoft replicas.