5 Weapons of choice for North East India militants

North East India is the melting pot of various insurgent and ethnic rival groups and illegal narcotics trade is one of the major reasons for the insurgencies to continue and spiral in the North-east. The insurgents need more sophisticated weapons to overthrow the firepower of the state for which they need funds and very often illicit trade in narcotics is the best source to raise funds for weapons procurement.

The 5 weapons of choice are:

#Heckler & Koch HK33
The HK33 is a 5.56mm assault rifle developed in the 1960s by West German armament manufacturer Heckler & Koch GmbH (H&K), primarily for export.

The HK-33 rifle, which can fire 750 bullets per minute, was developed by the German company Heckler and Koch in 1960s as a scaled-down version of their G3 battle

rifle, and entered production in 1968. Additionally, the HK33 can be used to mount a 40 mm under-barrel HK79 grenade launcher or a blank-firing adaptor.

Ulfa chief Paresh Baruah was instrumental in adding this German rifle to its arsenal.

#AK series
A Kalashnikov rifle is any one of a series of automatic rifles based on the original design of Mikhail Kalashnikov and are officially known in Russian as “Avtomat Kalashnikova” but are widely known as Kalashnikovs, AKs, or in Russian slang, as a “Kalash”.

Relative cheapness has always been one of the most important advantages of AK-47.According to intelligence reports AK series rifles are available for Rs 4 to Rs 4.5 lakh each.

The AK-47 can also mount a cup-type grenade launcher, the Kalashnikov grenade launcher that fires standard RGD-5 Soviet hand-grenades with a maximum effective range of approximately 150 meters. The advantage of the launcher is it can be used to launch tear-gas and riot control grenades.

As of 2004, out of the estimated 500 million firearms worldwide, approximately 100 million belong to the Kalashnikov family, three-quarters of which are AK-47s.

#RPG-7
The RPG-7 is a portable, unguided, shoulder-launched, anti-tank rocket-propelled grenade launcher.

According to the United States Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) Bulletin 3u (1977) Soviet RPG-7 Antitank Grenade Launcher—Capabilities and Countermeasures, the RPG-7 munition has two sections: a “booster” section and a “warhead and sustainer motor” section. These must be assembled into the ready-to-use grenade.

In Mogadishu, Somalia, rocket-propelled grenades were used to down two U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopters in 1993 which was portrayed in a book ‘Black Hawk Down’ by Mark Bowden.

Recently,tribal guerrillas used rocket-propelled grenades which killed 20 Indian soldiers in the mountainous northeastern state of Manipur.

#IED
A game changer in the theatre of battle. An improvised explosive device (IED) is a bomb constructed and deployed in ways other than in conventional military action.

IEDs are generally seen in heavy terrorist actions or in unconventional warfare by guerrillas or commando forces in a theater of operations. IEDs fall into three types of categories: Package Type IED, Vehicle-Borne IEDs (VBIEDs)and Suicide Bomb IED.

IEDs are assembled inside pressure cookers, fire extinguishers which makes the nature of it more deadly whereas the Naxals in Hyderabad and Bihar resort to the use of gelatine sticks for their IEDs.

IEDs found in Kashmir and North-East not only need expertise and training but also access to resources.

Explosives researcher Norman A. MacLeod used it to design a weapon to counter human-wave assaults, such as those waged by Chinese soldiers against Americans in the Korean War. He named his antipersonnel mine the claymore, after the two-handed sword wielded by his Scottish ancestors.

The Claymore is command-detonated and directional, meaning it is fired by remote-control and shoots a pattern of metal balls into the kill zone like a shotgun.

Internally the mine contains a layer of C-4 explosive behind a matrix of about seven hundred 1/8-inch-diameter (3.2 mm) steel balls set into an epoxy resin.

Claymores found use starting or ending ambushes and were carried extensively by Special Forces, who deployed many in a circle to guard their position as they slept.

In 2013 GNLA militants triggered a powerful claymore IED blast at Nengkhra in East Garo Hills. 30 meters of fuse wire used to charge the firing mechanism was also retrieved from the site of the ambush.