Century Arms has posted this photo on their social media pages accompanied with a caption that reads: “Long time no see!“. For most of the folks in the US AK community, this was a clear hint that they are going to resume the importation of Romanian WASR rifles chambered in 5.56x45mm NATO / .223 Remington. Many of the AK media sources immediately started speculating with the possible upcoming reintroduction of these rifles and some have even confirmed it. Particularly, AK Operators Union said on their Facebook page: “Yes, 5.56×45 Wasr is coming, yes we will review it!“.

Century Arms has been earlier importing such 5.56 rifles called WASR-3 from the Romanian Cugir Arms Factory. However, at some point, they stopped importing the rifles for reasons unknown to this author. If you do an online research or ask your AK friends, you’ll hear a lot of extremely different comments. Some will state that these are the most fun AKs they’ve ever owned, others will assure you that WASR-3 was the worse 5.56 AK in terms of the reliability and they experienced a lot of feeding issues. Apparently, these issues were mainly magazine-related and were fixed in later imported guns. Well, hopefully, there will be reviews of the newly imported 5.56/.223 WASRs and we’ll see how they perform.

What do you think about the reintroduction of .223/5.56 WASR rifles to the US market? Do you own a WASR-3 rifle? What is your experience with those AKs? Which magazines worked best for you? In general, what is your opinion about the .223/5.56 AKs – do you think they offer significant advantages to the American AK owner in terms of the availability of a wider variety of ammunition options or do you prefer your AKs in original calibers (7.62x39mm and 5.45x39mm)? Sound off in the comments section.

Stay tuned to learn about the availability of these rifles.

Images by Century Arms