US coordinates arms transfers to Syria militants: Croatian newspaper

The United States has coordinated the shipment thousands of tons of weapons from Croatia to the militants in Syria with assistance from the UK and other European countries, a report says.

The Croat newspaper Jutarnji List, which provided the fullest details on the arms shipments, claimed that 3,000 tons of weapons, paid for by Saudi Arabia as requested by the US, have been airlifted from Zagreb airport in 75 planeloads to the militants through Jordan since November.

Previous reports had said that the weapons dated back to the former Yugoslavia but the newspaper revealed that they also came “from several other European countries including Britain.”

A spokesman for the Foreign Office rejected the report, saying “the UK has not supplied weapons to the Syrian opposition.”

The weapons include rocket launchers, recoil-less guns and the M79 anti-tank weapons.

The report added that Russian-made Ilyushin jets from Jordanian International Air Cargo have regularly been seen in Zagreb airport in recent months.

The first cargo planes involved in the shipments were, according to the report, from Turkey, which also helped organize the transfer of the arms through Jordan.

Reports of the Croatian weapons in Syria first came to the surface last month when Eliot Higgins, an arms expert who blogs under the name Brown Moses, noticed in the videos posted on the YouTube that the militants had weapons in their hands not seen before in the two-year conflict.