(Gaza) It appears the recent bun fight inside Gaza has seen the combat debut by Hamas (and its ilk) of a not before seen anti-tank missile sourced from the land of the free - North Korea. It seems that a long time ago, in a land far, far away, somebody sold North Korea the 9K111 Fagot anti-tank missile and they reversed engineered it and gave it a new name... Bulsae-2.
The missile in question has been known to have been exported to Iran, in fact, a shipment of arms from NK destined for Iran containing the said missile system was seized by the Thai authorities in December 2009 and, as we all know, weapons received by Iran have a habit of percolating down to Hamas and Hezb-allah... but only for peaceful purposes.
Well, the photo shy military arm of Hamas, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades (anybody seen a gun totting terrorist on the worlds news, as I haven't), have released pictures of themselves shooting off with their hands around something hard and long, and what do you know, it's only the Korean version of the Fagot they have their hands clamped tight around.
So how good is the Fagot, initially designed to replace the 9K11 aka the Sagger, which blazed into history during the Yom Kippur War? When it first came out, the Fagot could defeat 400mm of rolled homogeneous armour, with the latest iterations capable of defeating 600mm. The system is very portable and has a maximum range of 2 km. The nearest western equivalent would be the French Milan.
While I initially came across this story from Jane's Defence Weekly, the real news hound behind this are the nice people at Arms Contol Wonk and Oryx Blog. Give them a butchers, you'll like what you'll find.
So, in the future, if you get into a bun fight with some prat who claims that all the weapons used by Hamas are home made, just call him a 9K111 Faggott.
The missile in question has been known to have been exported to Iran, in fact, a shipment of arms from NK destined for Iran containing the said missile system was seized by the Thai authorities in December 2009 and, as we all know, weapons received by Iran have a habit of percolating down to Hamas and Hezb-allah... but only for peaceful purposes.
Well, the photo shy military arm of Hamas, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades (anybody seen a gun totting terrorist on the worlds news, as I haven't), have released pictures of themselves shooting off with their hands around something hard and long, and what do you know, it's only the Korean version of the Fagot they have their hands clamped tight around.
So how good is the Fagot, initially designed to replace the 9K11 aka the Sagger, which blazed into history during the Yom Kippur War? When it first came out, the Fagot could defeat 400mm of rolled homogeneous armour, with the latest iterations capable of defeating 600mm. The system is very portable and has a maximum range of 2 km. The nearest western equivalent would be the French Milan.
While I initially came across this story from Jane's Defence Weekly, the real news hound behind this are the nice people at Arms Contol Wonk and Oryx Blog. Give them a butchers, you'll like what you'll find.
So, in the future, if you get into a bun fight with some prat who claims that all the weapons used by Hamas are home made, just call him a 9K111 Faggott.
