Papers found in Timbuktu suggest al-Qaeda has ground-to-air missiles
Discovery of a manual, written in Arabic, for a ground-to-air weapon raises fears terror group has the means to shoot down an airliner
The photocopies of the manual lay in heaps on the floor, in stacks that scaled one wall, like handouts for a class.
The 26-page document in Arabic, recovered in a building that had been occupied by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) in Timbuktu, strongly suggests the group now possesses the SA-7 surface-to-air missile, known to the Pentagon as the Grail, according to terrorism specialists. And it confirms that the al-Qaeda cell is actively training its fighters to use these weapons, also called man-portable air-defence systems, or Manpads, which probably came from the arms depots of the late Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi.
"The existence of what apparently constitutes a 'Dummies Guide to Manpads' is strong circumstantial evidence of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb having the missiles," said Atlantic Council analyst Peter Pham, a former adviser to the US military command in Africa and an instructor to US Special Forces. "Why else bother to write the guide if you don't have the weapons? … If AQIM not only has the Manpads, but also fighters who know how to use them effectively," he added, "then the impact is significant, not only on the current conflict, but on security throughout North and West Africa, and possibly beyond."
This is not the first al-Qaeda-linked group thought to have Manpads - they were circulating in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a terror cell in Somalia recently claimed in a video to have the SA-7. But the US desperately wanted to keep the weapons out of the hands of al-Qaeda's largest affiliate on the continent, based in Mali. In the spring of 2011, before the fighting in Tripoli had even stopped, a US team flew to Libya to secure Gaddafi's stockpile of thousands of heat-seeking, shoulder-fired missiles.
By the time they got there, many had already been looted.