Attachments
Guns rarely die. They just change hands
There’s a bitter truth in warzones that should be read out to the men in suits who approve arms deals and the generals who sign off on weapon transfers.
Once a gun is made, it doesn’t disappear. It lingers. It doesn’t fall apart on its own will. It just finds new hands.
In the badland-borderlands of the central Sahel, Salafi jihadist groups are waging war with weapons of the past. No ideology-driven arsenals flown in from foreign patrons. No 21st-century weaponry bought in dark web bazaars. No, they fight with legacy weapons — the battered remains of Cold War stockpiles and looted state arsenals. Assault rifles made in 1960s China, machine guns long ago forged in Soviet factories, battle rifles that outlasted the very regimes and ideologies that birthed them.
This is the stark picture painted by Point-Blank: Weapons Seized from Salafi-Jihadist Groups in the Central Sahel, the second issue in Conflict Armament Research’s (CAR) Frontline Perspective series, published this month. Authored by James Bevan, Benjamin King, and Sigrid Lipott, the report is nearly a decade worth of fieldwork, documenting more than 700 weapons recovered from jihadist groups like JNIM, ISSP, ISWAP, and Boko Haram across Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger. It’s a pretty impressive piece of research.
And the findings are not easy reading and would, probably, not fit well into a gung-ho Hollywood film of how African arms itself. There is no central Nicolas Cage-type arms dealer. There is no evidence of a bespoke foreign supply chain orchestrated by a man in a linen suit. There is no real smoking gun of state-sponsored terror.
It’s rather boring, in fact. It’s just opportunism. The jihadists taking what they can get — mostly from national security forces.
According to CAR, at least one-fifth of the weapons were diverted from state custody. That figure, they note, is almost certainly an underestimate. So – these guns weren’t crafted for jihad. They were meant for national defence — until they were captured in ambushes, looted from overrun barracks, or siphoned off through corruption and chaos.
And the age of these weapons? Many were manufactured in the 1960s and 1970s. Few were made after 2011 — the year Gaddafi’s fall unleashed a flood of arms across North Africa. And here’s the point: even guns that predate the fall of the Berlin Wall are still killing people in 2025. As Bevan and his colleagues show, guns have endurance. They outlive governments, ideologies, and intentions.
This echoes a truth I laid out in my own book Gun Baby Gun: a gun is one of the most durable consumer products ever designed. Once made, it rarely disappears. It’s passed from hand to hand, battlefield to battlefield, until it finds someone to kill. Again and again.
Sometimes politicians seem to treat arms deals like they have a sell-by date, but there’s no obsolescence in an assault rifles. It doesn’t matter who bought it first. What matters is who’s holding it now.
In the Sahel, that’s often a teenage fighter conscripted into a jihadist militia — armed with the very weapons once issued to the soldiers meant to stop the likes of him (or, more likely, his father) having a gun. The lines between state and insurgent blur when both carry identical rifles.
CAR’s report isn’t just about logistics — it’s about consequences. It reminds us that weapons have a longer afterlife than any policy or counterterrorism strategy. They are, in every sense, a problem deferred. Every rifle shipped without proper end-use controls, every arsenal left unsecured, every war wound left to fester — these are the cracks through which insurgency spreads.
So here’s a polemic built on data: if you build a gun, it will be used. If you lose a gun, it will be found. And if governments ignore this cycle — as they so often do — they can’t act surprised when the next massacre comes courtesy of their decades-old exports.
Read the report. It’s a reminder from the past where the problems of the present came from.