THE WORST OF THE LOT

THE HISTORY OF THE IRAQI TABUK AK RIFLE

- VLADIMIR ONOKOY

Wherever you go in the world, everyone knows what AK47 (or just Kalashnikov) means. From Indian soldier to Columbian drug cartel member, from a Saudi prince to U.S. Marine, everybody knows this rifle and often has a very personal story about it to share.

Over the last 70 years, different countries and groups all around the globe have used AKs. These rifles symbolized freedom and terror, resistance, and oppression. There’s no other weapon that inspired so many books, songs, art objects, and exhibitions while creating so much controversy.

What many uninformed people don’t know is that most of the Kalashnikovs circulating the world have nothing to do with Russia or Soviet Union — when I worked in Iraq as an armorer, out of several thousand AKs I inspected only about a dozen that were manufactured in the Soviet Union.

NOT JUST RUSSIA

Everything else came from all around the world: China, Romania, Hungary, Serbia, Poland, Bulgaria, or one of 20 other countries that produced different AK variants.

Most of those countries received direct transfers of technology from the Soviet Union in the early ’50s, but some had a more intricate path to manufacturing Kalashnikov rifles.

Arguably, Iraq had the weirdest path — what they produced was essentially a copy of a pirated copy, exactly like the DVDs you can buy at any Iraqi market.

YUGOSLAVIAN ROOTS

In the late ’70s, Saddam Hussein came to power in Iraq and started a war with Iran. Iran was big and powerful; Iraq was small, but quite rich at the time, so Saddam thought he had a chance. He just needed one thing — weapons.