China replaces Britain in world’s top five arms exporters

 A visitor to the China Aviation Museum, located on the outskirts of Beijing, takes a photograph of a row of old anti-aircraft guns on display in this August 17, 2010 file photo. REUTERS/David Gray

BEIJING (Reuters) – China has become the world’s fifth-largest arms exporter, a respected Sweden-based think tank said on Monday, its highest ranking since the Cold War, with Pakistan the main recipient.

China’s volume of weapons exports between 2008 and 2012 rose 162 percent compared to the previous five year period, with its share of the global arms trade rising from 2 percent to 5 percent, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said.

China replaces Britain in the top five arms-dealing countries between 2008 and 2012, a group dominated by the United States and Russia, which accounted for 30 percent and 26 percent of weapons exports, SIPRI said.

“China is establishing itself as a significant arms supplier to a growing number of important recipient states,” Paul Holtom, director of the SIPRI Arms Transfers Program, said in a statement.

The shift, outlined in SIPRI’s Trends in International Arms Transfers report, marks China’s first time as a top-five arms exporter since the think tank’s 1986-1990 data period.

Chinese HQ-16 is a medium-range surface-to-air missile (SAM) system being launched vertically during an airdefense exercise.

Now the world’s second-largest economy, China’s rise has come with a new sense of military assertiveness with a growing budget to develop modern warfare equipment including aircraft carriers and drones.

At the Zhuhai air show in southern China in November, Chinese attack helicopters, missiles, unmanned aerial vehicles and air defenses were on public show for the first time.

SIPRI maintains a global arms transfers database base that tracks arms exports back to the 1950s. It averages data over five-year periods because arms sales vary by year.

“Pakistan – which accounted for 55 percent of Chinese arms exports – is likely to remain the largest recipient of Chinese arms in the coming years due to large outstanding and planned orders for combat aircraft, submarines and frigates,” SIPRI said.

North Korean soldiers salute during a military parade to mark 100 years since the birth of the country’s founder Kim Il-Sung in Pyongyang on April 15, 2012. (AFP Photo / Pedro Ugarte)

Myanmar, which has been undergoing fragile reforms that the United States thinks could help counter Beijing’s influence in the region, received 8 percent of China’s weapons exports.

Bangladesh received 7 percent of the arms, and Algeria, Venezuela and Morocco have bought Chinese-made frigates, aircraft or armored vehicles in the past several years.

Beijing does not release official figures for arms sales.

Germany and France ranked third and fourth on the arms exporter list. China followed only India in the acquisition of arms, though its reliance on imports is decreasing as it ramps up weapons production capabilities at home.

After decades of steep increases in military spending and cash injections into domestic defense contractors, experts say some Chinese-made equipment is now comparable to Russian or Western counterparts, though accurate information about the performance of Chinese weapons is scarce.

China faces bans on Western military imports, dating back to anger over its crushing of pro-democracy protests in and around Tiananmen Square in 1989. That makes its domestic arms industry crucial in assembling a modern military force that can enforce claims over Taiwan and disputed maritime territories.

China has faced off recently with its Southeast Asian neighbors and Japan over conflicting claims to strings of islets in the South China Sea and East China Sea, even as the United States executes a military pivot towards the Pacific.

(Reporting by Michael Martina; Editing by Nick Macfie)

A North Korean missile Taepodong class is displayed during a military parade on April 15, 2012. (AFP Photo / Pedro Ugarte)

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China’s Type 95 Assault Rifle

High-ranking general in the Syrian army defects

A Syrian boy waves the Syrian revolutionary flag during a celebration to commemorate the second anniversary of the Syrian revolution, in Amman, Jordan, Friday, March, 15,  2013. Around a thousand Syrians gathered in front of the Syrian embassy, and chanted slogans against Assad, and the Baath regime that has ruled Syria for the last 40 years. (AP Photo/Mohammad Hannon)

By BEN HUBBARD | Associated Press

BEIRUT (AP) — A high-ranking general in the Syrian army defected on Saturday with the help of rebels and said morale is low among those still fighting for President Bashar Assad as the civil war enters its third year.

Maj. Gen. Mohammed Ezz al-Din Khalouf told Al-Arabiya TV that many of those still with Assad’s regime have lost faith in it.

“It not an issue of belief or practicing one’s role,” he said. “It’s for appearance’s sake, to present an image to the international community from the regime that it pulls together all parts of Syrian society under this regime.”

Activist videos posted online Saturday showed Khalouf sitting with a rebel fighter after his defection and riding in a car to what the video said was the Jordanian border.

The video said he was Chief of Staff for the army branch that deals with supplies and fuel.

While widespread defections from the Syrian army have sapped it of much of its manpower during the two-year-old anti-Assad uprising, high-level defections have been rare.

The Syrian government did not comment on the defection.

Still, cracks continue to spread slowly through Assad’s regime as rebel forces slowly expand their areas of control in the country and put increasing pressure on the capital, Damascus.

Also Saturday, Human Rights Watch said Syria’s government is expanding its use of widely banned cluster bombs.

The New York-based rights group said Syrian forces have dropped at least 156 cluster bombs in 119 locations across the country in the past six months, causing mounting civilian casualties. The report said two strikes in the past two weeks killed 11 civilians, including two women and five children.

The regime denied using cluster bombs, which open in flight, scattering smaller bomblets and have been banned in many countries. They pose a threat to civilians long afterward since many don’t explode immediately.

Human Rights Watch said it based its findings on field investigations and analysis of more than 450 amateur videos.

A senior Syrian government official on Saturday rejected the report, saying many amateur videos were suspect. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to make official statements to the media.

The fighting in Syria has killed some 70,000 people and displaced 4 million of the country’s 22 million people, according to U.N. estimates.

The conflict remains deadlocked, despite recent military gains by the rebels.

In new violence, rebels detonated a powerful car bomb with more than two tons of explosives outside a high-rise building in the eastern city of Deir el-Zour, setting off clashes with regime troops, state TV and activists said.

On Saturday, rebels in Deir el-Zour detonated a car rigged with more than two tons of explosives next to the tallest building in the city, known as the Insurance Building, state TV said.

State TV says rebels entered the building after the blast but were pushed out by government forces. No casualties were reported in the blast, but the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said four fighters were killed in subsequent clashes with regime troops.

Regime forces also shelled several areas of the city, the activist group said.

In an amateur video said to be showing Deir el-Zour, heavy gunfire was heard in the background and a cloud of smoke was visible.

The blast came a day after Syrians marked the second anniversary of the start of their uprising against President Bashar Assad. The rebellion began with largely peaceful protests, but when the regime cracked down on demonstrators, the unrest evolved into an insurgency and then a civil war.

In recent months, the Assad regime has escalated airstrikes and artillery attacks on rebel-held areas in the north and east of the country, rights groups have said.

The Observatory also said at least 12 rebel fighters were killed in clashes near a cement factory in the northern city of Aleppo, and five people were killed when a shell exploded in the Damascus neighborhood of Qaboun.

Also Saturday, the head of Syria’s leading opposition group issued an anniversary message to Syrians, saying that the uprising has “has taken a long time.”

The opposition recognizes March 15, 2011 as the start of the uprising.

In a video posted on his Facebook page, Mouaz al-Khatib, head of the Syrian Opposition Coalition, congratulated the town of Yabrud, north of Damascus, for creating a civil council to run its affairs.

“Our people are great, our people are civilized and they don’t need gangs to rule them,” al-Khatib said, sitting in front of a Syrian flag and cracking a rare smile. “They just need to breathe a little bit of the air of freedom and they’ll create as they have created in all places.”

All videos appeared authentic and corresponded with other reporting by The Associated Press.

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Associated Press writer Albert Aji in Damascus, Syria, contributed to this report.

http://news.yahoo.com/high-ranking-s
yrian-general-defects-army-174227684.html

Rights group says Syria using cluster bombs

Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan addresses a forum in Istanbul, Turkey, Saturday, Oct. 13, 2012. Turkey’s prime minister sharply criticized the U.N. Security Council on Saturday for its failure to agree on decisive steps to end the 19-month civil war in Syria. (AP Photo)

AMMAN, Jordan (AP) – An international human rights group said Sunday it has obtained new evidence that Syrian troops are using cluster bombs – widely banned munitions that pose a grave risk to civilians because they burst into bomblets over large areas and often linger on the ground, detonating only when touched.

By JAMAL HALABY

Steve Goose of U.S.-based Human Right Watch said cluster bombs “have been comprehensively banned by most nations, and Syria should immediately stop all use of these indiscriminate weapons that continue to kill and maim for years.” HRW had previously reported cluster bomb remnants found in Homs and nearby Hama this summer.

“Syria’s disregard for its civilian population is all too evident in its air campaign, which now apparently includes dropping these deadly cluster bombs into populated areas,” said Goose, who is HRW’s arms director. Syrian government officials had no immediate comment.

There were also new signs of the mounting tensions between Turkey and Syria, two former allies who have become bitter foes since the outbreak of the 19-month-old rebellion against President Bashar Assad. Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu announced that Turkey is barring Syrian civilian flights from Turkey’s airspace, a day after Syria issued such a ban for Turkish commercial aircraft. Davutoglu said Syria is “abusing” civilian flights by using them to transport military equipment.

Last week, Turkey forced a Syrian plane coming from Russia to land and confiscated what it said was military equipment on board. Russia said the plane was carrying spare radar parts, while Syria accused Turkey of piracy.

After a week of exchanges of fire across the volatile border, a Turkish newspaper reported that Turkey has reinforced four naval bases along its Mediterranean coast north of Syria. In an unattributed report, the Hurriyet daily said Turkey sent frigates with cannons, as well as anti-ship and anti-aircraft missiles to the naval bases.

Turkey has been retaliating for Syrian shells and mortar rounds hitting Turkish soil.

Despite Turkey’s recent measures, Syrian opposition leaders say Ankara and other foreign backers of the rebels are not doing enough to help them break the battlefield stalemate. Abdelbaset Sieda, head of the largest opposition group, the Syrian National Council, said the international community is doing nothing more than managing the Syrian conflict.

The international community must establish safe havens in Syria and enforce no-fly zones to help the rebels counter the regime’s airstrikes on rebel-held areas, Sieda told reporters in Istanbul, Turkey. This would also cut down on the number of Syrians seeking refuge abroad and “resolve the humanitarian crisis, especially with winter approaching,” he said.

The idea of safe havens has found little international support. Foreign backers of the rebels fear being dragged deeper into the conflict. Over the summer, the Assad regime stepped up airstrikes in an attempt to dislodge rebel fighters from urban strongholds, sharply driving up daily casualty tolls.

In its report on cluster bombs, Human Rights Watch said Syrian activists posted at least 18 videos from Oct. 9-12 showing remnants of the bombs in or near several towns, which included the central city of Homs, the northern cities of Idlib and Aleppo, the countryside in Latakia, and the eastern Ghouta district near the capital Damascus.

Many were on a north-south highway that has been the scene of fighting in recent days.

Cluster bombs are of particular concern because they scatter small bomblets over a wide area. Many of the bomblets do not immediately explode, posing a threat to civilians long afterward.

Human Rights Watch said the munitions in the video were Soviet-made. Before its collapse, the Soviet Union was a major arms supplier to Syria.

It is nearly impossible to independently verify such reports in Syria, where journalists’ movement is restricted and the government keeps a tight-lid on news related to the revolt, which it blames on a foreign conspiracy.

The report said the cluster bomb canisters and submunitions displayed in the videos “all show damage and wear patterns produced by being mounted on and dropped from an aircraft.” Some residents confirmed in interviews that helicopters dropped cluster bombs near their homes on October 9, the group said.

The group did not have information if the munitions had caused any casualties.

Human Rights Watch “is deeply concerned by the risks posed by the unexploded submunitions (bomblets) to the civilian population, as men and even children can be seen in the videos handling the unexploded submunitions in life-threatening ways,” according to the report.

HRW said it had confirmed that the fragments shown in the videos were RBK-250 series cluster bomb canisters and AO-1SCh fragmentation bomblets.

The military publisher Jane’s Information Group says Syria possesses Soviet-made RBK-250 cluster bombs, the report said. It said there was no information available on Syria’s acquisition of the weapons.

More than 32,000 people have been killed in Syria since a revolt against Assad erupted. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians have fled the fighting between the rebels and the army, which has been using missiles, tanks and warplanes in strikes that devastated whole neighborhoods.

Earlier Sunday, Syrian gunmen fired on a bus transporting workers to a blanket factory, killing four and wounding eight, a Syrian official said. He said the attack happened at the entrance of Homs. He gave no other details and spoke anonymously as he was not authorized to make statements to the media.

The Syrian state news agency said a suicide bomber crashed an explosives-laden sedan into a coffee shop at a Damascus residential neighborhood, causing damage but no fatalities. SANA said the explosion took place at dawn on the capital’s Mazzeh highway. An Associated Press reporter at the site says the blast destroyed a balcony and ripped off a building facade.

Hours afterward, a second blast rocked the same area, seriously wounding a journalist, the agency said. It said an unidentified armed group detonated an improvised explosive device attached to the car of the journalist, Ayman Youssef Wannous, who works for a private Syrian magazine.

In neighboring Jordan, Syrian refugee Mustafa Ali Kassim, 24, died of shrapnel wounds inflicted when the Syrian army opened fire at his group of 229 Syrian refugees while crossing a border fence into Jordan before dawn Sunday, said Syrian refugee camp spokesman Anmar Hmoud.

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Associated Press writer Frank Jordans in Istanbul, Suzan Fraser in Ankara and Albert Aji in Damascus, Syria, contributed to this report.