The Loose “Shoot and Scoot” Missiles and the Threat to Aviation

Rebel fighter taking a picture of a downed Sukhoi25 fighter jet in Syria's northwest province of Idlib.
Syrian opposition forces used a mobile missile to shoot down a Russian SU-25 fighter jet, in February, as it flew low over northern Idlib province.Photograph by Omar Haj Kadour / AFP / Getty

In 1978, I covered the downing of Air Rhodesia Flight 825 by guerrillas who’d gotten their hands on lightweight missiles that could be fired from the shoulder. A civil war had been raging for thirteen years in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. The plane, a turboprop full of civilians, crashed near Kariba, home to the world’s largest man-made lake. The charred corpses of the passengers and crew were laid out on wide plastic sheets. I had met three of the passengers in the course of reporting on the war. I still have the letter that I wrote to my parents about walking the site and wondering which of the unrecognizable bodies—or blackened pieces of them—were people I’d known. It was one of the first civilian jetliners downed by these missiles in modern warfare. Five months later, a second Air Rhodesia flight was shot down. I covered that one, too.

Forty years later, the same mobile missiles—nicknamed shoot-and-scoot weapons, because they’re simple to operate and allow a quick escape—are an even graver threat. More than a million man-portable air-defense systems, or MANPADS, have been produced by more than twenty countries over the past five decades. Among the most common is the SA-7 (also known as the Strela-2), designed during the Soviet era, and the U.S.-produced Stinger. The majority of these weapons are still in government arsenals, but thousands have quietly made their way into an ever-expanding black market as a result of uprisings, wars, political chaos, and financial greed. A U.S. task force has tracked down and eliminated more than thirty-nine thousand MANPADS, in thirty countries, that were vulnerable to illicit proliferation, a State Department official told me. But at least seventy-two non-state groups—including extremists and rebel insurgents—have fielded MANPADS and related missile systems over the past two decades. They have posed a threat in dozens of countries, from the United Kingdom to Ukraine, Spain to Sudan, Kosovo to Kenya, and Ivory Coast to Colombia, according to the Small Arms Survey, a nonprofit group that tracks the use of the weapons worldwide.

The mobile missiles are a more widespread threat than any weapons of mass destruction—nuclear weapons, biological or chemical weapons, and ballistic missiles, according to Matthew Schroeder, a senior researcher at the Small Arms Survey. “The danger is not theoretical,” he told me. “It’s already happened repeatedly in multiple theatres.” Since 1975, MANPADS have been fired at more than fifty civilian aircraft in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Twenty-eight were shot down.

In past attacks, the rippling repercussions have been deadlier than the loss of life on aircraft. In 1994, the downing of a plane carrying the Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi—as they returned from peace talks in Tanzania—triggered a frenzied genocide in Rwanda. More than half a million people were killed in a hundred days. In 2002, Al Qaeda-affiliated extremists, perched on a jeep outside the airport in Mombasa, Kenya, fired two SA-7 missiles at an Israeli charter flight, a Boeing 757, as it took off with more than two hundred and sixty people on board. The missiles missed, narrowly, but a simultaneous attack on a hotel run by Israelis was successful. Flights from Israel ended, and tourism to Kenya took years to recover.

The political chaos generated by the Arab uprisings, in 2011, unleashed thousands of missiles onto the black market. During Muammar Qaddafi’s four-decade rule in Libya, he acquired some twenty thousand MANPADS—the largest stockpile of any country that didn’t produce them. (Like the majority of lightweight missiles on the loose, they were Soviet- or Russian-designed.) Qaddafi’s arsenals were looted or overrun during the eight-month uprising, in 2011, that led to his overthrow and death. A U.S. and NATO task force went in to recover and destroy the missiles that it could find, but many were never accounted for, the team admitted. By 2014, a U.N. panel had documented illicit transfers of MANPADS from Libya to countries in North Africa, including Tunisia, Mali, and Chad, and across the Mediterranean to Lebanon and Syria. The same thing happened in the turmoil after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003; up to four thousand MANPADS went missing, the Arms Control Association reported.

Today, groups such as ISIS, Al Qaeda, and the Iran-backed Hezbollah all have mobile surface-to-air missiles. In 2013, a copy of an Al Qaeda manual—a kind of MANPADS for dummies—was found in Mali. With macho flair, fighters have flaunted their illicit acquisitions like trophies—the missile tubes perched on their shoulders or laps—in pictures on Twitter and Instagram. All three jihadi groups have used them. “These are portable—less than fifty pounds and around six feet long—and can easily be smuggled in the back of a pickup truck or the cargo hold of a small boat,” Schroeder said. The three parts of MANPADS—a grip stock, the battery unit, and the missile in a launch tube—can be easily dismantled and smuggled separately. They’re hard to detect, much less intercept. “It’s really difficult to tell the difference between the tube and piping used for home plumbing,” the State Department official told me.

In Syria, anti-government forces used MANPADS to shoot down a Russian SU-25 fighter jet, in February, as it flew low over northern Idlib province. The pilot ejected but was killed by rebels after he landed. A Russian cargo plane and a Turkish military helicopter were shot down by MANPADS in Syria, in 2016, and at least a dozen Syrian military aircraft have been downed by a range of MANPADS since the civil war broke out, in 2011, U.S. officials and arms experts told me. In Egypt, jihadi extremists brought down a military helicopter with MANPADS in the Sinai Peninsula, in 2014.

The dangers have not just been in the unstable Middle East. In 2014, Russian-backed separatists shot down a Ukrainian military transport plane as it approached an airfield in Luhansk, near the Russian border. All forty-nine passengers and crew were killed. A French Air Force Mirage jet was shot down by MANPADS in Bosnia, in 1995.

The effective range for MANPADS peaks at fifteen thousand feet, so aircraft are most vulnerable during takeoff and landing. Helicopters and low-flying prop planes often fly within the range of mobile missiles. After ISIS seized large swaths of Iraq and Syria to create a caliphate, in 2014, its fighters shot down several Iraqi helicopters. Typical MANPADS can target a plane from as far away as three miles, according to the Arms Control Association.

“The nightmare scenario is that a terrorist group with the resources and connections required to obtain several functional MANPADS will stage multiple attacks at major airports in different countries over a week or two,” Schroeder added. “That would bring civil aviation to a halt—globally. The threat is very real until we lock down these weapons worldwide, the prospects for which are currently limited.”

Even the U.S. military feels vulnerable. In 2001, shortly after 9/11, I flew on Secretary of State Colin Powell’s plane to Islamabad, where he tried to broker Pakistan’s coöperation for the U.S. war in Afghanistan. On our way in, the plane dropped a literally breathtaking seventeen thousand feet (or so I was told) in under three minutes. Air Force spotters were deployed at the exit-row windows to watch for missiles. When we left Islamabad, the conspicuous U.S. plane, with its light-blue-and-white markings, started to race down the tarmac even before we were all seated. It then squealed to a halt at the runway’s end, did a dizzyingly fast turnaround, and raced down the tarmac in the opposite direction—an apparent effort to avoid missiles.

MANPADS can be conflict changers. Stingers, the U.S.-made MANPADS, were a major factor forcing the Soviet Union to end its decade-long occupation of Afghanistan. Stingers brought down more than two hundred and sixty Soviet military aircraft, challenging Russia’s vast airpower advantage over poorly equipped mujahideen fighters. After the Soviet withdrawal, in 1989, however, hundreds of Stingers went unaccounted for. The United States launched a program called Operation Missing-in-Action Stingers, and invested more than sixty-five million dollars to buy back its own weapons. The proffered prices were up to four times the Stingers’ original value. Attempts to buy back Stingers dragged on into the twenty-first century. Rebels and extremists often have limited interest in buyback programs. The missiles are a tradable commodity; they’re a status weapon.

U.S. officials are now worried about the growing turmoil in Venezuela, which has more than five thousand MANPADS, the largest stockpile of missiles of any country in Latin America. Last year, when Mike Pompeo was still the director of the C.I.A., he warned, at a Senate hearing, that the Venezuelan government might not be able to sustain full control of its arms, including its missiles, given the deteriorating political crisis. “This risk is incredibly real and serious . . . to South America and Central America in addition to Venezuela,” Pompeo said.

The dangers don’t end when conflicts cease. “The sheer number of MANPADS out there, combined with the battle-tested fighters, is very concerning. These are weapons that are easy to smuggle, easy to use, and can have catastrophic impact, especially if used against commercial airliners,” the U.S. official with the State Department task force told me. “Even when wars end, there will still be loose MANPADS that could target civilian planes—for example, flying over Syria—or be taken to battlefields elsewhere.”