More on death from the skies in Syria

By Dan Murphy, Staff writer / February 23, 2012

DigitalGlobe/AP

I wrote a few days ago about Bashar al-Assad's use of 240mm mortar rounds on the city of Homs, particularly the Baba Amr neighborhood, where dozens have died in the past week of withering shelling, among them two foreign reporters.

Monitor librarian Leigh Montgomery and the folks at SIPRI (they have forgotten more about the world's arsenals than you will ever know) helped me track down a little more information about what the Syrian regime is using on Homs, and possibly other cities.

I'd thought the firing platform for these beast-sized mortars -- with 75 pounds of explosives and a range of up to 12 miles -- was the Russian-made Tulip, basically a tank designed to deal death from a distance. But while it's possible that Tulips have been delivered by Russia to Syria in the past year, there's no evidence of that, and past SIPRI research shows no signs they've ever been delivered to the country. (Russia is Syria's major arms supplier, and the value of its shipments increased by 58 percent last year.)

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More on death from the skies in Syria

A little more information on what the Syrian regime is using on Homs.