Reuters/Yemen's Defence Ministry

In late January, Americans from the Navy

destroyer Farragut and Yemeni coast guard forces boarded a 130-foot boat called the Jeehan 1 as it plied the Arabian Sea. After securing the vessel and its crew, the two teams opened the cargo holds to find a cache of gear that reads like an insurgent's wish list: stacks of C-4 explosives, electronic circuits, small-caliber ammunition, laser range finders, and artillery shells that can be converted to roadside bombs. Perhaps most worrisome, the boarding party found 10 wooden crates containing shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles. And those boxes had Chinese stencils on them, indications that the missiles were built by state-owned China Precision Machinery Import and Export Company. Images of the missiles identify them as QianWei1-M antiaircraft missiles.

"The QW1-M are systems we've not seen on the black market yet," says Matt Schroeder, senior analyst at the Federation of American Scientists. "It's a much more recently manufactured system and more technologically capable than what's out there."

The discovery in the Arabian Sea is not isolated. A rebel group in Syria posted pictures of themselves with Chinese FN-6 missiles, another kind of shoulder-fired antiaircraft missile. And just today, new video surfaced on YouTube from Syria seemingly depicting a shootdown.

These weapons are leaking into the world's hotspots. But where are they coming from?

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MANPADS

The shoulder-fired missiles, which experts call Man-portable Air-defense Systems (MANPADS) are easy to use: Get the target in the sights and the system flashes a light and beeps to tell the user it is now tracking the target. Once the missile is launched, the infrared seeker homes in.

The Chinese licensed the design of the QW1 to Pakistan; later, reports circulated that Pakistanis used the weapon to shoot down an Indian Air Force MiG-21 and a MiG-27 in 1999. Those alleged shootdowns happened before enhancements to the missiles that were found on the weapons heading to Yemen—enhancements that make them even deadlier, including a smarter thermal seeker in the missile that can ignore countermeasures and an optical sight with day/night vision.

In 2002, a civilian airliner in Mombassa, Kenya, was shot with a missile. No one was killed, but the attack inspired a global effort to track these antiaircraft weapons. That appears to be faltering as advanced weapons appear in war zones. "Information we got on black market missiles suggested there was a change in types of missiles available, and perhaps a tightening globally of controls on MANPADS," Schroeder says. "We'd seen few, if, any later-generation systems. But the QW-1M is a very recently fielded system."

Who's Responsible?

However the weapons got there, it's a proliferation nightmare. Either a state bought the weapons from China and is transferring them to a proxy group in Yemen, or corrupt Chinese officials diverted them to the black market. "There is one other option: leakage from the arsenals of importing state," Schroeder says, suggesting a legitimate purchaser could have lost the Chinese missiles to theives.

To find out, arms-control groups are looking for clues about the weapons' destination. "We hope to get more information... possibly from the U.N. delegation looking into this," Schroedersays. "It would be good to get some kind of confirmation of to whom they were headed. If we can get that, we can assess the significance [of the find] with a bit more certainty."

Officials in Yemen (and off-the-record sources in media reports) say the weapons were destined for use by the Houthi rebels in north-west Yemen, a Shiite sect that seeks to impose Sharia law. This once-isolated group appeared, reinvigorated, in Yemen's capital last year. The group's protests have international targets: chiefly Israel and the United States, which is one reason U.S. diplomats and Yemeni security officials claim Iran is backing the group. Shipping a cache of weapons to the Houthi would violate a 2007 U.N. resolution banning Iran from exporting arms. But the Chinese weapons found in the hold of the Jeehan 1 are not smoking guns. There is no publicly available evidence that the Iranians sent the weapons cache to the Houthi rebels.

China could also be in trouble: The sale of new antiaircraft missiles to Iran would violate U.N. sanctions against providing weapons to the regime. For Iran to ignore sanctions is not strange, but China is typically more cautious of what diplomats call global norms, Schroeder says.

This is not the first time Iran has been accused of sending Chinese antiaircraft missiles into war zones in defiance of the U.N. The Wikileaks documents included a 2008 warning from the Bush administration to Beijing to stop arms transfer to Iran. Antiaircraft missiles the Pentagon believed China had sold to Iran were found in arsenals of Shiite insurgents fighting the coalition in Iraq. The U.S. accusation never made that accusation publicly.

The discovery and its possible implications come at a troubling time. Tensions are at a boiling point as the Iranians peruse an atomic program; vice president Joe Biden just this week said publicly that the threat of armed force against Iran was "not a bluff." Meanwhile in Asia, China and Japan are increasingly hostile toward each other and the United States has announced a strategic shift to the Pacific to counter China's military rise.

This Yemeni flare-up pits global powers against one another at a delicate time. This isolated, impoverished nation could be the spark that ignites several powder kegs.

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