Commercial airlines would be well advised to install countermeasures on every aircraft within Europe and especially flying around the Middle East.
H/T: Vlad
TIMBUKTU, Mali (AP) — The photocopies of the manual lay in heaps on the floor, in stacks that scaled one wall, like Xeroxed, stapled handouts for a class.
Except that the students in this case were al-Qaida fighters in Mali. And the manual was a detailed guide, with diagrams and photographs, on how to use a weapon that particularly concerns the United States: A surface-to-air missile capable of taking down a commercial airplane.
The 26-page document in Arabic, recovered by The Associated Press in a building that had been occupied by al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb in Timbuktu, strongly suggests the group now possesses the SA-7 surface-to-air missile, known to the Pentagon as the Grail, according to terrorism specialists. And it confirms that the al-Qaida cell is actively training its fighters to use these weapons, also called man-portable air-defense systems, or MANPADS, which likely came from the arms depots of ex-Libyan strongman Col. Moammar Gadhafi.
It’s just a matter of time until the aviation underwriters refuse to insure aircraft until this threat is mitigated. The economic chaos of living with a crippled aviation industry might be just the consequence to defeat our ‘progressive’ elites’ obsession with supporting our enemies.
Maybe we’ll even learn to call them enemies! What a concept!