When you follow the gun trail, you sometimes end up in unexpected places

Robert Fisk, discusses how he followed the trail of weapons from the front lines of Syria to a small village in Bosnia

By Robert Fisk

December 09, 2019 "Information Clearing House" - I’ve always wanted to find out where the guns came from. Who were the ‘willing accomplices’ to the wars I witnessed?

In 1996, I traced to its Boeing makers in the deep south of the US a missile fired by the Israelis at a Lebanese ambulance. It killed two women and four children. I even went to Georgia and met the developers of the rocket that killed them. And in Syria, deep in the basement of a bombed Nusra-al-Qaeda headquarters in Aleppo, I found hundreds of mortars – along with their shipment documents and factory instructions. They were to be used against the Assad regime. But who had supplied them?

They had been made in Novi Travnik in Bosnia, a town I knew well because I had covered the Bosnian war. One of the shipment papers carried the dispatcher’s name: Ifet Krnjic. I felt – I absolutely believed — I could find this man. A hunch? No. I set off to Novi Tavnik with the conviction that this man was there and would talk to me. And we found him, mowing his lawn on a Sunday afternoon in a neighbouring village.