Who Armed Syria?

Sometimes, when trying to walk the steps backward from a nation engulfed by war through the processes that armed the combatants, the record is full of blank spots. Such is the case in Syria.

While much of the visible military hardware is fairly easy to connect to its manufacturer, what is much more difficult is establishing when the items were transferred to Syria, There is, in the moral and political senses, a very large difference between transferring say, cluster bombs to Syria in 1982 and in 2012.

But cluster munitions are at least ordinarily easily linked to their manufacturer. The origins of the small-arms ammunition in Syria have been much more difficult to establish, in part because many of the headstamps that are being seen are not listed in the readily available identification keys. Add in that building the record required for ammunition tracing is often more tricky than other forms of ordnance tracing – in part because the identifying features of cartridges typically do not show up in photographs, unless a photographer is deliberately striving to make such a record – and there are many blank spots in the picture of Syria’s ammunition acquisitions indeed.

Bit by bit we try to add to the record, tonight with these images from the infantry school at Muslimiya, (entrance visible in pic, bottom right), which antigovernment fighters overran last month. The photographs are of packaging for 7.62x39mm ammunition for Kalashnikov assault rifles. I’ve not seen packaging before labeled in quite this way. Perhaps it can help lead, step by step, to the source.

You think rifle cartridges don’t matter, and are less important than big-ticket items? Don’t fool yourself. They are essential to horrors like this.

Pooling records of packaging and ammunition markings can lead to breakthroughs like this.

If you can link the packaging above to a particular cartridge plant, drop a line to chivers@nytimes.com.