Arming for the Syrian War: Do Soaring Prices Predict Escalating Conflict? ISLAHIYE, Turkey -- Abu Hamed, a former Syrian Army captain who is now a guerrilla commander fighting to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad, sat cross-legged in a tent in a refugee camp this week, echoing one of the Syrian opposition's most common complaints. "We need weapons," he said. All kinds of weapons. And then, as the conversation deepened and tea flowed, he spoke of prices. Mr. Hamed leads a battalion near Aleppo. The demand for weapons on his turf is so high, and supplies are so short, he said, that he has had to pay more than $4 for a single rifle or machine-gun cartridge. A Kalashnikov assault rifle, he said, costs $2,000 or more. In the history of conflict, these are high prices, and they suggest many things worth exploring. So At War will break this post into two parts. First, a summary of the data and what it might mean. And then, for readers who like multimedia, an exercise on how it all translates to violence and, in the rebels' hopes, to the cost, literally, of tactical success. We'll begin with the data. In informal surveys in the past week, taken during interviews with fighters and commanders near Turkey's border with Syria, the price range for infantry arms and ammunition suggested an intense demand. When compared to years of price data, collected for coverage in The New York Times or as research for The Gun, my social history of assault rifle proliferation, these prices were near the upper range. Such demand exists in context, signaling that even after the conflict escalated in recent months, and the armed opposition's ranks grew, there remain many men in Syria seeking military arms. If history is a guide, they will find them. Gray- and black-market dealers are unlikely to miss out on this party, and anti-Assad fighters can reasonably be expected to capture more arms from defeated Syrian military and paramilitary units, and in turn put more men under arms. Taken together, and if one believes in arms-price horoscopes, the arms prices collected suggested that -- barring a surprise, like the swift fall of the Assad government and the acceptance of defeat by its army and Alawite supporters -- the number of military arms in the public's hands can be expected to keep growing. What did the data say, specifically? Mr. Hamed's ammunition price was higher than the price data shared by nearly a dozen commanders and other fighters; the typical price quote from the others was $2 per rifle round. But his other data was consistent with the statements of the rest, including commanders from Idlib and Hama, many of whom gathered last Friday in Antakya to vent frustration with the state of arms supply. According to these men, Kalashnikovs now cost $1,000 to more than $2,000 (depending on condition), full RPG-7 systems (a reusable launcher with two or three high-explosive antitank rounds) cost more than $2,000, and each replacement grenade costs $500. PK machine guns, another common firearm, cost $6,000 to $7,000. No modern infantry rifle is available for less than $900. Some cost several times that. Thus, arming three riflemen, a machine gunner and a man with a rocket-propelled grenade could easily cost a commander more than $10,000 -- not counting ammunition. There were curiosities in the mix, and these drove costs even higher. The American-designed M-16 has been present in Syria's internal war, most often seen with a telescopic sight, as below. And the prices were very high - from $5,000 to $7,000 per rifle, with scope. The consistent association of scopes on these rifles suggests that the higher-velocity and flatter-shooting trajectory of the M-16 line, and its general reputation for better accuracy than the Kalashnikov, might mean they are seeing limited use as sniper rifles. (At War uses that ever-slippery word "sniper" generously; for further discussion of its meaning here, read this post and its companion from the current Afghan war. But again, context matters. The M-16 has not been a primary arm, the fighters said. Mr. Hamed openly dismissed its value - not because of its performance but because of an unreliable ammunition supply. "We had M-16s but we only had 100 bullets for them," he said, smiling ruefully. So the M-16 became useless. We are using it as a stick. The Dragunov line of semiautomatic sniper rifles, shown below, is apparently in larger circulation. And fighters said they liked them for reasons related to -- you guessed it -- supply: the ammunition is compatible with that of the PK machine guns. But these rifles, fighters said, have also been hard to obtain, reflected in what they said they had paid for them -- $1,500 to $5,000 each. (Future arms researchers be warned: some fighters did not know this weapon by its internationally recognized names, the SVD or Dragunov. Only when shown sketches of the rifle did they light up. "Ahh, Brezhnev!" one said.) Last year, in Libya, arms researchers watched the swift arc from arms scarcity to oversupply among the opposition forces. From late winter into early summer, weapons were in short enough supply that many Libyan men went to battle without them, ready to pick up the weapon of a fallen fighter, while hoping to capture the weapons of slain Qaddafi troops. At that time, Kalashnikovs could cost $2,000 or more, just as they do for Syrian fighters now. By last fall, after the struggle for the country ebbed, many fighters possessed several rifles, along with machine guns or rocket-propelled grenades. Prices were plummeting, with reports of Kalashnikovs for sale at less than $500. Post-Qaddafi Libya, which for months had inhaled weapons, had become a black-market exporter, with all manner of arms being reported traveling out. With this in mind, one Syrian rebel commander from Idlib, after the meeting last Friday, drove with journalists from The New York Times to a house he and a commander from Hama share with an ever-changing collection of fighters. His name was Abu Hamza, and he was a former major in the Syrian army. Abu Hamza wanted more weapons. But he said he worried where this was headed - toward the possibility of chaos. "After the war," he said, "we have to collect these weapons." Abu Hamza was confident about the prospects for the uprising; there is no question, he said, that Mr. Assad will fall. But he worried about the effects of these weapons on post-conflict Syria. "We have been watching," he said, "and we do not want Syria to be like Afghanistan, Somalia or Libya." The Price of a Firefight Now that you have a sense of prices, and an understanding of the long-range worries as a population arms itself, put these prices into a more immediate context. We'll do that via a straightforward yet maddeningly difficult exercise. If you have a few minutes, sit to watch a few of the uncountable videos made in firefights in Syria this year. Here are about two minutes of skirmishing, said to be from the outskirts of Hama. The opening of this next video shows the last minutes of an urban assault on a security building in Homs. And this crudely edited post presents a variety of scenes, its producer claims, from recent fighting in Salquin. This exercise gets progressively harder. When you watch, try to count each bullet fired by the anti-Assad fighters, and try to identify and count the weapons in the hands of the same men. There is no time limit. You can watch each video as many times as you wish. Have paper and pencil ready, and add up the cost of what you see and hear. Then the prices listed in this post will have a fuller feel, the more so because these videos are only a few minutes long, a tiny sample from a sprawling and potentially long-running war. And the remarks of one fighter will ring true. "People are selling their cars or even houses to raise money to help the fighters," the fighter said. But you can sell your house, and it might be enough for a battalion to have one or two hours of big fighting. This is another example of the cost of war, literally, in this case waged by a population that has put itself, with little international help, under arms.