Ammunition

Ammunition (commonly shortened to ammo) is propellant and projectile, or broadly anything that can be used in combat including bombs, missiles, warheads, landmines, naval mines, and anti-personnel mines. The word comes from the French la munition which is all material used for war. The collective term for all types of ammunition is munitions.

The purpose of ammunition is to project force against a selected target. However, the nature of ammunition use also includes delivery or combat supporting munitions such as pyrotechnic or incendiary compounds. Since the design of the cartridge, the meaning has been transferred to the assembly of a projectile and its propellant in a single package.

Ammunition involves the application of fire to targets, general use of weapons by personnel, explosives and propellants, cartridge systems, high explosive projectiles (HE), warheads, shaped charge forms of attack on armour and aircraft, carrier projectiles, fuzes, mortar ammunition, small arms ammunition, grenades, mines, pyrotechnics, improved conventional munitions, and terminally guided munition.

Syrian Civil War

The Syrian Civil War (Arabic: الحرب الأهلية السورية‎) is an ongoing multi-sided armed conflict with international interventions taking place in Syria. The unrest began in the early spring of 2011 within the context of the Arab Spring protests, with nationwide protests against President Bashar al-Assad's government, whose forces responded with violent crackdowns. The conflict gradually morphed from mass protests to an armed rebellion after months of military sieges. A United Nations report released in December, 2012, stated that the conflict had "become overtly sectarian in nature", between Alawite–dominated government forces, militias and other Shia groups fighting primarily against Sunni-dominated rebel groups; however both opposition and government forces denied that.

Initially, the Syrian government relied mainly on its armed forces, but since 2014 local protection units made up of volunteers known as National Defence Force have come to play a larger role, gradually becoming the primary military force of the Syrian state. From the early stages, the Syrian government received technical, financial, military and political support from Russia, Iran and Iraq. In 2013, Iran-backed Hezbollah entered the war in support of the Syrian Army. Due to foreign involvement, the conflict had been called a proxy war between the regional Sunni and Shia powers, most prominently as a proxy conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran. In September 2015, Russia, Iraq, Iran and Syria set up a joint operation room (information centre) in Baghdad to coordinate their activity in Syria. On 30 September 2015, Russia started its own air campaign on the side and at the request of the government of Syria. The resultant proxy war between the United States and Russia led some commentators to characterise the situation as a "a proto-world war with nearly a dozen countries embroiled in two overlapping conflicts".