Probably a much more troubling development than the vast collection of different handguns (see my post here) is the increasing number of MANPADS creeping out of Qaddafi numerous weapon caches.
The soviet infrared-guided surface-to-air missile SA-7 can for example be seen in action in this picture or this one.
Especially alarming to me was this picture of a warehouse, clearly showing dozens of SA-7s ready to take.
The SA-7 is cold-war tech, introduced in the late 1960s, so nowadays its kind of outdated. It will have a hard time against combat jets, the infrared will get easily confused by so called flares, being emitted by the targeted aircraft. Those flares basically consist of magnesium stripes, who will burn at very high temperature when ignited. This way the signature of the aircrafts engine exhaust will be covered from the infrared-guided missile.
Additionally those missiles only have a limited time-frame before they expire, depending on the storage - there electronic is quite sensitive.
I have not been able to seek out how old those weaponry could be, yet i guess the arsenals got stocked up from time to time, whenever Qaddafi got the chance to acquire some.
Another point is that training is necessary, those missiles are not easy to handle. But apparently there is enough material for practice.
While there performance is poor against combat jets, they still are deadly to civil airplanes as well as helicopters. There have been attacks by al Qaeda in this style. With the rebels to be said having jihadists in there lines, they might spread this tools towards the global terror hot-spots.
This article is about Libyan SA-7 reaching the black market in Mali and also talks about a (key-) weapon buyback program.
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