MOSCOW. April 15 (Interfax-AVN) - The Syrian army is much weaker than the Iraqi one, and should the American-British coalition launch another operation in Syria, the latter will not be able to put up strong resistance.
"The military and technical level of the Syrian army is by no means better and even worse than those of the Iraqi army," Konstantin Makiyenko, deputy director of the Center for Strategies and Technologies, a Moscow-based think tank, told Interfax-Military News Agency Tuesday.
He said that Syria, although having not been officially subject to an embargo, has not procured much weapons due to shortage of money and strong Israeli pressure on potential contractors.
"The Syrian army currently operates obsolete weapons that are no competition to state-of-the-art American and Israeli systems," he said.
According to him, the Syrian military, unlike their Iraqi counterparts having extensive experience of positional warfare with Iran and short but no less valuable experience of resisting high-tech American forces, were last engaged in 1982.
"It is noteworthy that during the Syrian-Turkish crisis of 1998 when Ankara demanded deporting (Abdullah - Interfax-AVN) Ocalan, the leader of the Workers' Party of Kurdistan, the Turkish General Staff planned it would take it one day to destroy the Syrian army," the expert said.
According to London International Strategic Research Institute, the Syrian army has 4,700 MBTs (2,000 - T-55, 1,000 - T-62, and 1,700 - T-72/72M), 1,200 of them stationary. The Air Force has 90 SU-22 Fitters, 20 SU-24 Fencers, 44 MIG-23BN Floggers, 170 MIG-21 Mongols, 30 MIG-25 Foxbats, and 22 MIG-29A Fulcrums. The air defenses include 600 S-75 and S-125 launchers, 200 Kub missiles, 60 Osa, and 48 S-200 systems.
The only large batch of military hardware supplied to Syria from Russia was under two contracts worth USD150m on the Kornet-E and Metis-M antitank missile systems, signed by the Tula Instrument-Making Design Bureau. Unofficial sources also say that Russia has withdrawn another contract between Syria and the Kolomna Machine-Building Design Bureau on the Igla-2 portable anti-aircraft missiles under pressure from the U.S. and Israel.