[The National Interest] Key Point: The old rifles were sold by the Eastern bloc to the Middle East decades ago.In 2012, rebels of the Free Syrian Army posted a video in which they uncovered an arms cache containing five thousand assault rifles. Though not an uncommon episode in a civil war then in its early stages, what was truly bizarre was that the rebels had uncovered a cache of Sturmgewehr 44s‐an assault rifle designed by Nazi Germany seventy years earlier.
How did a weapon only produced in the final years of World War II begin appearing in a Middle Eastern civil war seventy years later?