History of Global Arms Transfer, 3 (2017), pp. 21-30

Post-Cold War Arms Recycling and theGenesis of the “Islamic State”
By TETSUYA SAHARA*
In this paper, the author attests to the fact that post-Cold War arms recycling is
one of the decisive factors that has reproduced a chain of regional conflicts.
When hostilities break out, surplus arms – often obsolete weapons of secondary
importance – pour into zones of conflict. After the war, the weapons subsequently
move to neighbouring regions of unrest and ignite new conflicts. The Yugoslav
War of Succession clearly displayed this pattern. The same mechanism is present
in the on-going Syrian Civil War, where the used arms from the Libyan battlefield
have played an important role in the deterioration of the situation. As the Syrian
Civil War became a quagmire, the increasing external arms supply to the rebels
eventually gave rise to the Islamist extremists and prepared the way for the
ascendance of the “Islamic State” (IS).

I
The latest research attests to the abrupt proliferation of regional conflicts and terrorist
attacks in the last few years.1 The increase in the number of conflicts and terrorism maysuggest a profound structural transformation of the capitalist global system, as thesimultaneous rise of the two different types of violence has shown a tendency towards theirmerger.
The traditional point of view based on comparative conflict studies holds thepresupposition that armed conflicts and terrorist attacks are two different phenomena. The
former is mainly considered as a form of politics, and is embodied, par excellence, by statefactors. On the other hand, the latter is seen as a kind of criminality carried out by nongovernment groups or individuals motivated by particular kinds of ideology. Yet the lasttwo decades have seen the rise of armed conflicts carried out by non-state actors, making
the old theory of war obsolete.2 The concept of “New Wars” has been challenged by the
concurrent upsurge in terrorist attacks that are conducted by non-state parties engaging inregional conflicts. The non-state actors in the armed conflicts intentionally mobilise suicide
bombers as a part of their war tactics. Thus, the demarcation line between armed conflicts
and terrorism is becoming increasingly blurred, and civil targets, often far away from thebattlefields, are prone to being attacked as a part of well-defined strategies.
The rise of the IS symbolises the new tendency, as it has pursued its “global jihad”* Professor, Faculty of Political Science and Economics, Meiji University

1 As for the increase in the number of armed conflicts, see: Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), http://

ucdp.uu.se; The increasing trend in the number of terrorist attacks has been ascertained by several key pieces ofresearch: Global Terrorism Index 2015, Institute for Economics & Peace, http://economicsandpeace.org/wpcontent/uploads/2015/11/Global-Terrorism-Index-2015.pdf; Терроризм в ХХІ веке, РИА Новости, https://ria.
ru/infografika/20160122/1363384811.html; and thee Global Terrorism Database, http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/
images/START_GlobalTerrorismDatabase_2015TerroristAttacksConcentrationIntensityMap.jpg
2 Kaldor, New and Old; Münkler, The New Wars.

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TETSUYA SAHARA
composed of the building of territorial states and the destruction of socio-political orders
by instilling fear among the citizenry through the concerted and global actions ofterrorism.3 Since the early 1980s, several Salafi–jihadi groups have started their statebuilding endeavours. They have tried to establish statelets governed by their version of
Sharia rule inside the territories that they control. All their efforts, except for the Taliban in
Afghanistan and Al Shabab in Somalia, were either short lived or meaninglessly small inscale.4 But from 2010 on, jihadi proto-states started to achieve relative success in many
localities. The most successful case is that of the IS. Since its inauguration as a “Caliphate”
in June 2014, the IS has deeply infiltrated a wide swathe of land in Syria and Iraq and has
consolidated its self-styled Sharia rule. Moreover, the IS has announced its will to expand
its territory beyond its key lands, and has amassed oaths of loyalty (bay’a) from among thechieftains of jihadi statelets scattered over the various parts of Africa and Asia.5
At the same time, the IS has incorporated various types of terrorist attacks into its
campaign to expand its “Caliphate.” Originally, the IS’s use of terrorist tactics was limited
to Muslim-populated areas. The IS suicide bombers targeted the Shiite population andChristian minorities in the Middle East, inflicting heavy civilian damage and provoking
hostilities against the Sunni community. They subsequently made use of the rift to induce
the Sunnis to support their cause.6 In the fall of 2015, however, the IS embarked on its
global terror campaign, effectively expanding its sphere of activities to Western Europe andSouth-eastern Asia.7 This change in tactics will expose a much larger global population tojihadi terror and may cause the further escalation of Islamophobia, producing fertile groundfor the IS to recruit its soldiers. Thus, how to prevent IS expansion is an imminent questionin terms of global security, and to prevent the vicious cycle from repeating, it is necessary
to elucidate its genesis and to destroy the grounds on which the group has hitherto
benefitted regarding its ascendancy.

II
One of the evident facts that has enabled the IS to infiltrate the war-torn regions in Asia andAfrica is the abundant supply of firearms. Where has the group secured its huge cache ofarms and ammunition from? It is logical that some of their arsenal came from the army
bases in Iraq and Syria that they captured. But a brief look at the inventory of arms the IS
fighters wielded during the battle of Kobani from September 2014 to January 2015 shows
us that a significant number of their weapons came from East European countries.8 How
did these weapons travel from the dusty shelves of military depots in former Socialist
satellite countries to the battlefields of the Middle East, ending up in the hands of jihadi
soldiers? To answer this question, we need to follow the relatively long history of therecycling system of obsolete arms that were originally produced to fight against “Capitalist
enemies.”
Christopher Carr illustrated the mechanism through which the Soviet model of assault
rifle, the AK47, came to dominate the battlefields around the globe in his excellent book,

3 Sahara, “The international.”
4 Lia, “Understanding jihadi.”
5 Azoulay, Islamic State.
6 Sahara, “The international.”
7 Towkiw, “List.”
8 Sahara, “International arms.”－ 22 －

POST-COLD WAR ARMS RECYCLING AND THE GENESIS OF THE “ISLAMIC STATE”
Kalashnikov Culture.9 A new model of automatic rifle designed by Mikhail Kalashnikov in1947 was adopted by the Soviet forces, and is still used as regular equipment in the Russianarmy. During its long history, the AK47 underwent several modifications but kept its basic
structure. Solid and sturdy, as well as easy to maintain, the rifle was preferred by ProCommunist rebels fighting against the colonialist masters in the 1960s and 1970s. The
generous Soviet policy of allowing the production of replica products by its allies hashelped with the further proliferation of the gun. But the real inauguration of “Kalashnikov
Culture” came after the fall of the Soviet Union. The AK47 increased its presence on
battlefields all over the world and travelled repeatedly from one conflict zone to another.
The “Kalashnikov” symbolises the post-Cold War pattern of recycling “used” arms. Whena regional conflict broke out, arms and ammunition (usually of secondary importance to the
cutting-edge military technology) poured in from surrounding countries. When the conflict
ended, the surplus arms would move to other conflict-affected regions, almost instantly.
The wars for Yugoslav succession clearly followed this pattern. For an entire decade
starting from the early 1990s, the land of the former Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia saw
incessant waves of bloodbaths. The first sign of Yugoslavia’s demise came from Slovenia,
where the local forces clashed with the Federal Army over the control of the international
border. The “Seven Days War,” as it was later called, was actually a series of small
skirmishes, and the Slovenian authorities did their best to describe the hostilities as mass
resistance against an oppressive Socialist military. Notwithstanding, they had long since
prepared for the battle, making use of external resources to enhance their military ability toa level that could compete with the federal forces.10
Socialist Yugoslavia had a unique defence system composed of two different but
theoretically intermixed structures. The federal forces (army, navy and air force) were
professional armed forces based on the nationwide compulsory draft. To supplement them,a civil militia, called the Territorial Guard, was set up in every corner of the federal state.
While the federal forces had a monolithic and highly centralised command structure
covering the Federation, the Territorial Guards were organised along the lines of republics,
with the municipality as their basic unit. Under the command of reserve officers, all thecitizens of military age were eligible for service. In peacetime, republican guards existed
only on paper, but once an emergency was declared, civilians were called up to take up
arms.
Within the multi-ethnic society of former Yugoslavia, Slovenia occupied a unique position
with almost a pure concentration of ethnic Slovenians. This allowed Slovenia’s newly
elected nationalist government to transform its Territorial Guard into a regular army withan independent command system. The Slovenian government carried out a secret mission
to construct a formidable force, smuggling in vast amounts of military equipment from allover the world, but mainly from neighbouring Hungary.
Croatians followed the same path, but they could not make full use of their Territorial
Guard asset. The republic had a decent-sized ethnic Serb minority and the Serbs dominatedin some municipalities. The nationalist government of Franjo Tudjman thus devised an
unprecedented method to transform the republican police structure into a paramilitaryorganisation. The first step was to ethnically cleanse the structure of Serb elements, under
the pretext that the Serb policemen were disproportionately represented. At the same time,a massive reinforcement of auxiliary police was underway through the recruitment of
9 Carr, Kalashnikov Culture.
10 Sahara, Bosnian.

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TETSUYA SAHARA
young Croats, many of whom had a criminal background. The third step was to secure arms
and equipment, and this task was assigned to the Interior Ministry. The entire republican
security structure then worked to coordinate arms smuggling on a massive scale, resulting
in a huge number of arms from the arsenals of East European countries being transported
into Croatia, thus enabling the nascent Croatian military to wage a full-scale war against
the federal forces.11
The Croatian War of Independence soon spilled over into Bosnia. The tripartite nationalist
coalition government could not maintain its fragile accord and had lost its control over the
territory. Many municipalities were divided along ethnic lines and the substructures of the
Territorial Guard were merged into three different ethnic military entities. The process was
accompanied by the elaborate construction of paramilitary forces under the command ofnationalist parties. The Croatian Democratic Union, a Bosnian branch of Tudjman’s party,
organised its own private army inside the municipalities of Croat plurality. With the help of
the Zagreb government, Bosnian Croats were well equipped with arms that were transferredfrom Croatian battlefields. The federal units evacuated from Croatia were redeployed in the
Bosnian Serb regions and subsequently handed over their weapons to local Serb forces.
The Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) constructed their own forces, partly by reorganising theTerritorial Guard, but also by constructing a private army of the Party of Democratic
Action.12
The Bosniak force was at a disadvantage in terms of military supplies. It could not securea reliable route for arms smuggling and was devoid of eternal patrons.13 This explains why
the Bosniaks could not take advantage of their numerical superiority during the early stagesof the war. This handicap, however, was subsequently overcome with the help of
Washington. The Clinton administration started covert operations to supply arms to the
Muslim forces. With CIA coordination, Iranian arms were smuggled into Bosnian territory
on a massive scale.14
The legacy of the arms-smuggling routes of the Bosnian Civil War together with theforeign mercenaries of the Mujahedeen were inherited by the Kosovars. The US
intelligence services gave their full support to the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) by
equipping and training its soldiers at a military base in Albania over the course of theKosovar Crisis of 1998–1999. An off-shoot of the KLA appeared in Macedonia in 2001.15
In this way, the successive wars in the former Yugoslavia were mutually connected by achain of arms transfer. The arms travelled from one battlefield to another, constituting aclear pattern of recycling. The “Yugoslav domino” usually means incessant waves of ethnic
hatred, but the real factor that caused the repeated conflicts was this chain of arms transfer,rather than the Balkanisation of nationalist politics. With the unending supply of arms andthe extrajudicial paramilitary units in their hands, the militant nationalists could claim
maximum political gains, rather than seeking possible concessions through negotiations.

III
The origins of the IS go back to the second US invasion of Iraq. The Iraqi affiliate of Al
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 Hoare, How Bosnia.
14 John R. Schindler, Unholy Terror: Bosnia, Al-Qa’ida, and the Rise of Global Jihad (St. Paul, Zenith Press:

2007); Wiebes, Intelligence.
15 Deliso, The Coming.

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POST-COLD WAR ARMS RECYCLING AND THE GENESIS OF THE “ISLAMIC STATE”
Qaeda, led by Abu Musab al Zarqawi, was originally a small group of little significancewith a limited sphere of activities. The popular resistance to the US occupation transformed
the group into the dominant element among the alienated Sunni communities. Zarqawi had
established control over the Anbar Province by 2006 and had declared the Islamic State of
Iraq (ISI) in October. With the ebb of the resistance movement followed by the US
evacuation, however, his successor, Abu Omar al Baghdadi, faced challenges from rival
Sunni factions, and his statelet was about to collapse. The tide of change came in 2011
when the Syrian Civil War broke out. Making use of his Iraqi base, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
launched an incursion into Syrian territory and successfully consolidated his power over awide swathe of land across the Euphrates. The process demonstrates how effectively
Zarqawi’s group and his successors were able to capitalise on the warring situation for theirstate-building goals.16
As we have seen in the case of former Yugoslavia, wars precipitate arms recycling. Whena war breaks out, arms begin to inflow from the outside world into the conflict zone. Often,
the arms accumulated in nearby battlefields are among the first to be delivered. The case of
the Syrian War is no exception to this rule.
In April 2011, popular unrest broke out in Hama. Albeit a Western media flare-up of a
Syrian off-shot of the “Arab Spring,” the uprising was essentially an armed revolt organisedby the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. The revolt was followed by a series ofdefections in the ranks of army officers and Baathist leaders. With the help of Turkey andsome Gulf countries, the defectors organised paramilitary formations and called themselves
the “Free Syrian Army” (FSA). The FSA was a puppet force rather than a form of popular
resistance, and it relied heavily on external support. Through the connection to Ihvan andAl Qaeda, foreign mercenaries headed to Syria and established themselves firmly inside the
FSA structure. Merged with the local extremist elements, Salafi–jihadis became
predominant among the rebel groups. The most prominent of all was the Nusra Front. Abu
Mohammad al-Golani, former adjutant of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, established the group on
23 January 2012, and swore a pledge to Ayman al-Zarqawi, the successor of Osama bin
Laden. But the preponderance of Nusra did not last long. Early in 2013, al-Baghdadi cameto Raqqa and declared the merger of Nusra and ISI into the “Islamic State of Iraq andLevant” (ISIL). Capitalising on the affluent arms supply to the Syrian rebels, ISIL started
flash counteroffensives on its Iraqi front, captured several strategic cities, including Mosul,
and firmly established its position as the new champion of global jihadism.17
As this process testifies, the Syrian Civil War has been a revolt of Salafi–jihadi extremists
from the onset. Lacking popular support, the movement has been hugely reliant on external
resources that were mainly provided by the foreign governments that aspired to topple theBashar Asad regime at all costs.18 Thus, they staged covert international operations to
supply arms and ammunition to the Syrian rebels.
The initial supply was to come through the Libyan route. On February 2011, the “National
Transitional Council,” an opposition group, rose up in arms against the Qaddafi
government. The rebel forces were an unstable coalition of local tribes and many of them
had Islamic extremist orientations. Some groups had tangible connections with Al Qaeda
and its affiliates.19 Regardless of that fact, the Western and Gulf sponsors lavishly armed
16 Sahara, “The international.”
17 Moubayed, Under.
18 Hoff, “2012 Defense”; A leaked e-mail of Hilary Clinton’s by Wikileaks, see: https://wikileaks.org/podesta-

emails/emailid/3774
19 Pargeter, “Are Islamist.”－ 25 －

TETSUYA SAHARA
the rebels and a huge number of lethal weapons were distributed among the militantjihadis.20 Moreover, when the Qaddafi force withstood the initial assault and started its
counteroffensive, NATO intervened in the war under the pretext of maintaining a “No Fly
Zone.” The Western fighter jets and drones systematically destroyed the government forces.
Under NATO’s air cover, the rebels took control of the main cities, including the capital.
Qaddafi was killed by mobs on 23 October 2011, effectively ending the Civil War.21 Since
then, the country has been thrown into permanent chaos and a state of anarchy exists thathas constantly gained in momentum. The major source of turmoil was the preponderance ofmilitant jihadis who had been empowered by the external supply of arms. They established
Islamist fiefdoms in several parts of the country.22
Faced with this sinister development, the US administration conceived a plan to transfer
Libyan arms to Syria, expecting that it could simultaneously reduce the risk of disorder in
Libya and increase the combat abilities of the Syrian rebels. The operation was composedof two parts. One was to collect the weapons that had been indiscriminately distributed
among various rebel groups during the Libyan War. The other was to transport the retrievedarms to the Syrian battlefields. Consequently, Barak Obama authorised the CIA plan tosupply arms to the “Syrian opposition” forces in early 2012.23
The CIA started to coordinate the operations in which Turkey, Saudi, Qatar, the UAE andJordan took part.24 With the help of Gulf money, the CIA agents were to purchase weapons
from the Libyans. The retrieved arms were subsequently to be shipped to Turkey andstockpiled at the headquarters that had secretly been opened in Adana, a South-eastern
Turkish city. The weapons were subsequently to be handed over to the Syrian rebels who
the CIA deemed as “moderate.”25 On 11 September 2012, however, Christopher Stevens,
the US Ambassador to Libya, who had directed the arms-gathering mission, was killed in
Benghazi by a jihadi group, and the operation was temporarily halted.26
The second route that was opened ran through the Balkans. From November 2012 toMarch 2013, a secret mission to smuggle arms from Croatia into Turkey was carried out.
Various weapons from the Croatian Army as well as from other countries were gathered ata military base near Zagreb airport in late 2012. Some of them came from Great Britain andother Western countries. But a significant number of them came from Hungary, Bosnia andHerzegovina, and Bulgaria. The collected arms were subsequently transported to Ankara by
Jordanian military flights and as chartered Turkish Air Line (TAL) cargo. The entire
operation was coordinated by the CIA.27

IV
From the onset, Turkey strongly supported the Salafi–jihadi elements, including ISIL, inthe Syrian Civil War. Turkey provided the major transit route for foreign fighters, smuggled
arms and ammunition into Syria, imported contraband crude oil and secured the extremists’financial resources.28 The self-radicalised Western jihadis, Arab and African Salafi fighters,
20 “Arms Dealer” in The Daily Mail, 13 Oct. 2016.
21 Welzenbach, “The Dreadful.”
22 Wehrey & Alrababa’h, “Rising”
23 Hersh, “The Red Line.”
24 Miller & de Young, “Secret CIA.”
25 Giglio, “Did the CIA.”
26 Taştekin, Suriye.
27 Žabec, “Zagreb.”
28 “Exclusive,” in The Canary, 16 Sept. 2016.

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POST-COLD WAR ARMS RECYCLING AND THE GENESIS OF THE “ISLAMIC STATE”
as well as extremists from former Soviet countries, such as Uzbekistan, Tajikistan andChechen, all came to Turkey and were then sent into the rebel-held territories in Northern
Syria.29 TAL carried thousands of jihadis to Istanbul, from where they went on their journey
to transit centres such as Kahramanmaras or Sanliulfa.30 The agents of the IS and otherrebel groups steered them to the border and smuggled them into Syrian territories with thehelp of Turkish border officials.31 The rebels were allowed to set up their headquarters
inside the Turkish border and were trained by Turkish officers. Several border towns
opened underground hospitals for the Syrian fighters and Turkish ambulances transported
those who were wounded on the Syrian battlefields.32 The petrol stolen from the Iraqi and
Syrian oil fields was carried by Turkish tanker trucks and sold on the black market.33
Istanbul served as the centre of money laundering for the ISIL/IS and other extremistgroups.34
Turkey also provided the main corridors for the weapons and other military equipment
earmarked for Syrian jihadis. As we have seen in the case of the Zagreb connection, someof the arms were brought in as civilian TAL cargo at the Esenboğa International Airport in
Ankara. The arms were then loaded onto the lorries chartered by the Turkish Intelligence
Agency (Milli Istihbarat Teşkilati, MIT) and sent into Syrian territory.35 The other arms
were shipped to Turkish ports such as Iskenderun and Ceyhan, and dispatched to the rebelheld territories.36 Pro-Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP or the Justice and Development
Party) charities, such as İnsan Hakkı and Hürriyet vakfi (İHH), took part in the mission,and their convoys smuggled arms and ammunition disguised as humanitarian aid.37
The following incident gives us a clue as to how deeply the Turkish administration iscommitted to these arms-smuggling operations. On 19 January 2014, the local gendarmerie
halted three trailers ostensibly carrying medical materials near Adana. When the officers
opened the containers, they discovered a huge amount of ammunition under a thin layer of
medicine boxes. The ammunition consisted of mortar shells, various bombshells andbullets. The Adana prosecutor started the investigation and the truck drivers witnessed how
the containers that were loaded onto their tucks had been delivered by a foreign air cargocompany at Esenboğa International Airport. Further details remain unknown, as thegovernor stepped in and the investigation was halted. The governor explained to theprosecutor that the order to halt the investigation had come directly from Prime MinisterErdoğan.38
Subsequently, the Turkish government issued an official communiqué claiming that theload was humanitarian aid for the Syrian Turkmen minorities. Somewhat later, however,
the Trade Minister modified the comment and admitted that a part of the load consisted ofrifles and pistols.39 More than a year later, an opposition paper, Cumhuriyet, published anarticle titled “Look, They Are the Weapons Erdoğan Claimed Were Non-existent” on 29
May 2015. The article covered the stories of the gendarmes and the prosecutor together
29 “Eren Erdem” in Birgün, 29 June 2016.
30 Acarer, “IŞİD”; “2013-2014 arasında,” in Birgün, 7 July 2016.
31 “Leaked,” in RT, 14 May 2016.
32 Acarer, “Cihatçılar.”
33 “ISIS,” in RT, 25 April 2016; O'Connell, “How ISIS.”
34 Cocker, “How Islamic.”
35 “Türkiye,” in Cumhuriyet, 14 July 2016; “Rusya,” in Sputnik, 7 June 2016; “İşte IŞİD'e r,” in Cumhuriyet,

27 April 2016.
36 “IŞiD’e,” in Cumhuriyet, 16 Oct. 2015.
37 “Silahlar,” in Özgür Gündem, 24 Oct. 2015.
38 Dundar, “İşte.”; “Suriye'ye,” in Sol, 13 Oct. 2015.
39 “Turkish,” in Today’s Zaman, 29 May 2015.

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TETSUYA SAHARA
with photos of the bombshells. A video recording the investigation was uploaded on thenewspaper’s website.40
The leak came as a fatal blow to the cover-up that Erdoğan and his henchmen had been
implicated in. The Vice-Chair of the Foreign Diplomacy Committee of the ruling AKP
made a remark that the load was actually a particular kind of weapon. Yet at the same time,
he insisted that the arms were to be delivered to the FSA, and not to the IS. Per the analysis
in the Nokta newspaper, however, some of the smuggled ammunition consisted ofbombshells for tanks. They were a product of the former Soviet Union and came from the
Libyan arsenal. While the FSA had no tanks, both the IS and Nusra possess tanks plunderedfrom Syrian military bases. The Nokta editor concluded the shells were earmarked for
either the IS or Nusra.41
On 11 June 2015, Cumhuriyet covered another story that attested to the link between the
Turkish government and the IS. Two buses chartered by the MIT carried IS soldiers andsmuggled them into Syria. On the night of 1 January 2014, a number of IS soldiers camefrom Syria to a Turkish town, Reyhanlı. They were loaded onto the buses, and passing
through the Turkish territory, they arrived at Akçekale near Şanlıurfa.42
The Turkish role as the arms-smuggling hub for the jihadis can be further revealed
through examining the following two incidents. On 10 May 2015, a Turkish cargo boat,
Tuna I, was attacked by a Libyan jet, and one of the crew was killed. The Turkish
government issued a communiqué, and claimed that the ship was carrying plaster boards
from Spain and that its destination was Toburg. The Libyan Tobruk government rebuttedthe claims and disclosed that the ship had altered its route towards Derne. As the ship paid
no heed to the warnings to change course, the jet opened fire. At the time of the incident,
Derne was controlled by Libyan affiliates of the IS. The UN investigation mission
subsequently determined that the ship was carrying arms designated for the jihadis.43 The
second incident took place on 2 September of the same year. The Greek coast guard
captured a Turkish cargo ship, the Haddad I, in the open sea near Crete. The Iraklion police
found the ship was carrying a total of 4881 carbines and 492,000 rounds of bullets
disguised as furniture. The ship came from a Turkish port, Iskenderun, and was heading for
Misrata, the stronghold of the Libyan branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. The port-paroleof the Turkish Foreign Ministry released a comment, claiming that the ship was carrying
rifles purchased by the Sudanese police.44 One may wonder how the load could possibly
travel through the jihadi-controlled area of Northern Libya to reach the hands of the alleged
customer in Sudan.

V
Post-Cold War arms recycling is still in force in the wider Mediterranean regions. The
surplus arms used in local conflicts are transferred to other zones of conflict and further
aggravate the hostilities. In most cases, the USA acts as the main coordinator of arms
transfer, with the aim of securing its hegemonic interests without leaving any trace of its
involvement. This vicious cycle of arms transfer has prepared the fertile ground for the
Salafi–jihadi extremists to proliferate. ISIS is merely the latest product of this vicious
40 Dundar, “İşte.”41 Erbaş, “Libya-Ankara.”
42 “MİT,” in Today's Zaman, 11 June 2015.
43 Owen, “Turkish,”; Kirkpatrick, “Turkish Cargo.”
44 “Ηράκλειο,” in Ζούγκλα, 6 Sep. 2015.

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POST-COLD WAR ARMS RECYCLING AND THE GENESIS OF THE “ISLAMIC STATE”
cycle.
Footnote references
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Acarer, E. “Cihatçılar Türkiye’ye kaçıyor,” Birgün gazetesi, 5 Oct. 2015.
Azoulay, R. Islamic State franchising: Tribes, transnational jihadi networks and generational shifts. CRU
Report. [online] Clingendaen, Netherlands Institute of International Relations, (2015) https://www.
clingendael.nl/sites/default/files/Rivka-Azoulay_Islamic_State_expansion_CRU_April2015.pdf
Carr, C. Kalashnikov Culture: Small Arms Proliferation and Irregular Warfare (Westport, 2008).
Cocker, M. “How Islamic State’s Secret Banking Network Prospers,” WSJ, 24 Feb. 2016.
Deliso, C. The Coming Balkan Caliphate: The Threat of Radical Islam to Europe and the West (Westport,
2007).
Dundar, C. “İşte Erdoğan’ın yok dediği silahlar,” Cumhuriyet, 29 May 2015.
Erbaş, E. “Libya-Ankara-Suriye hattında Türk silah tacirleri,” Nokta, 15 June 2015.
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v36/n08/seymour-m-hersh/the-red-line-and-the-rat-line
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Kaldor, M. New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (Cambridge, 2012).
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terrorismanalysts.com/pt/index.php/pot/article/view/441/872
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Münkler, H. The New Wars (Cambridge, 2005).
O'Connell, K. “How ISIS Oil Flows through Turkey and Israel on Its Way to Europe,” Syndicate News, 12Oct. 2015.
Owen, K. “Turkish Ship Shelled off Libya Coast, Officer Killed, Several Crew Injured,” RT, 11 May, 2015.
Pargeter, A. “Are Islamist extremists fighting among Libya’s rebels?” Combatting Terrorism Center, (2011)https://www.ctc.usma.edu/posts/are-islamist-extremists-fighting-among-libya’s-rebels
Sahara, T. Bosnian Civil War: Globalization and Ethno-nationalization of Chaos (in Japanese) (Tokyo,
2008).
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