Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and today we are taking a look at a fantastically rare and very cool Iraqi sniper rifle, this is an Al-Kadesih. And it's essentially what you would
get if you wanted to build a Dragunov, but instead you actually had the tooling
to make a Yugoslav M70 pattern AK. Which pretty well describes the state of
the Iraqi weapons industry in the 1980s. Now a little bit of back story here, first
Al-Kadesih is actually the name of a battle. The battle of Al-Kadesih took place
in current-day Iraq in about the year 636. It was a significant victory for
the Arab Islamic forces in the area, and essentially signified the beginning
of Arab Islamic rule in Persia. Now Saddam Hussein during the
course of his rule, really liked to try and tie himself and his image to that of
historic Arab victories, a pan-Arab state. He wanted to be the protector of the
Islamic Arab communities in the Middle East. So you'll see that on a bunch of his weapon
names, and Al-Kadesih is no exception. Now this was also actually made
at the Al-Qadisiyah Establishment, one of several dozen defence manufacturing
facilities that were built during Saddam's rule in Iraq. This particular one is a little bit south of
Baghdad and it specialised in making small arms. In the late 1970s, I think 1979
specifically, Hussein partnered up with the Yugoslavian government for technical
assistance and they built essentially an AK factory. And it was a factory specifically to
manufacture copies of the Yugoslav M70 series. This would be known in Iraq
as the Tabuk (t-a-b-u-k). And I actually have a previous video that I did with
Miles Vining of Silah Report on the Tabuk rifles. Which is really cool and you ought to
check it out if you haven't seen it before, I'll link to it at the end of this one. One of the Tabuks is ... called the
Tabuk sniper and it is essentially an AKM, a Yugoslav M70 pattern rifle, in 7.62x39
with a very long barrel and a scope rail. But that's not the only sniper rifle
that the Iraqi Army was using, or the Iraqi government was
manufacturing at Al-Qadisiyah. They also actually made
essentially a Dragunov copy. But like I said, this is based on a facility that
was set up to manufacture the Yugoslav M70. So let's go ahead and take
a closer look and pull it apart, because internally this is
not your normal Dragunov. And in fact shares no parts
compatibility with a Dragunov, nor for that matter, a
Yugoslav M76 or a Romanian PSL. Alright, let's start by taking a look at
the markings here, we have Al-Kadesih. And by the way, some of the early production
ones are actually spelled a little differently, s-i-a-h. There were a couple of other transliterations,
different spellings, for Al-Kadesih, I'll list all of them that I'm aware
of down in the description text. But that's how the later
production rifles were marked. Then we have the calibre which is 7.62x54
rimmed, same as the Soviet Dragunovs. And "Made in Iraq", now why is this
marked in English you might wonder. And there are a couple
of potential answers. One is that the Al-Qadisiyah Establishment
was offering guns for international sale, for export as a way
to raise hard currency. And marking things in English was
in some ways sort of a sign of prestige, it indicated more international
education, sort of a higher status. A lot of stuff was marked in English
... under the Iraqi government. Next up we have our serial number
here and date of production. So the way that the Al-Qadisiyah
Establishment serial numbers worked (and this applies to the
Tabuks as well as these rifles), the first three digits of the serial
number are actually a batch code. So this is the 500 series, you'll see a wide
variety of other series marks on Tabuks often designating different combinations
of features, different patterns. The four final digits here are the
actual serial production numbers. So I don't think I've ever seen an Al-Kadesih
sniper here with a serial number over 2,000, certainly not over 3,000,
production was very slim. As for production dates, we know
these were made from 1988 until 1991. And then there appears to have been a batch
made in 2003 just before the US invasion. That serial number is also
repeated on the bolt carrier, and back here on the top cover. The Al-Kadesih can be really hard to
distinguish from a true Dragunov in photos. Especially photos taken from
a distance or slightly out of focus. The best feature you can look for
to identify them is the magazine. Because what we have here is compatible,
interchangeable with a Soviet Dragunov magazine. But instead of just standard
plain reinforcing ribs, the Iraqis put on a palm tree
and a sabre as reinforcing ribs. Now the magazines are pretty clumsy,
like there's some QC issues here. ... They are tricky to
get out and interchange. For what it's worth, the
owner of this rifle says he has four of these magazines,
and this is the best fitting one. There's your side by side comparison. There are some differences in the
spot [welding] and some subtle differences, but these are in fact
interchangeable magazines. PSL magazines however, will lock in place
but not actually function in Al-Kadesihs. Next up I want to take a quick look at the optic,
this is a copy of a Yugoslav ZRAK M76 scope. It is mounted on a standard rail, so this will fit any Russian or
Chinese optic that will fit a Dragunov. So you'll often see PSO scopes on these,
but the official scope for them was the M76. This is a 4x power scope, we have a Yugoslav
serial number here, ON-M76 is the model name. You'll notice it has a
BDC cam for 7.62x54 rimmed. This is the same scope that the Yugoslavs put
on the M76, their designated marksman's rifle. The inscription on the
top says "Made in Iraq". It's not entirely clear to me
if this was actually made in Iraq, or if it is a re-labelled
Yugoslav production scope. ... Well this one is clearly missing
the little tag that is sort of a nuclear warning symbol, because these
had tritium illumination at one point. The Iraqis did manufacture
optics but they also apparently got some just re-labelled from
Yugoslavia, not clear to me which this is. Now when we start looking at
the rifle up close you'll start to notice a lot of elements that
are AK and not Dragunov. So the first one that sticks out
here is this bulged front trunnion. The ... true Dragunov
is a milled receiver gun and it does not have rivets up here and it
does not have this strengthening bulge to it. These are representative of the
Yugoslav M70 series of AKs, which had reinforced
front trunnions just like that. If we go to the back we can see the same thing,
we've got a riveted-on rear trunnion here. The buttstock is very similar to the design of
a Dragunov buttstock with a few differences. It has a really actually sharp
corner at the back here which ... would definitely be
uncomfortable in shooting. It's a fairly short length of pull surprisingly,
and to me uncomfortably short. There is a plain rubber
butt pad on the back. You do not generally see
them with cheek rests here. And I'm not sure if this is
an authentic Iraqi one, or if it has been taken off of a
Dragunov or an NDM-86 and put on here. If you look, the latch doesn't
actually fit, you should pull this all the way back to lock it in place.
Instead it barely fits on in the open position. And the lacquered wood here looks much
more like a true Dragunov than Iraqi production. Disassembly is going to be basically
the same as a real Dragunov, we are going to rotate this
disassembly lever all the way back, which will allow us to
pull off the top cover. The top cover has a pivoting ... recoil spring
guide and a two-part recoil spring. You can see there's a lug here, and this locking bar is what
actually holds the top cover in place. I can then pull the bolt carrier
back and lift that out. Then we are going to lift the safety up. By the way I didn't mention it, but we have
Arabic markings here for safe and single fire. If I lift this up, there we go,
that safety lever pops out. And then we can pull the
back of the trigger guard down, and the whole fire control unit comes
out as a unit, just like a real Dragunov. We have a handguard retainer up at the
front here, I'm going to push that in ... and rotate it down, and then I can
slide the handguard retainer forward. Then like a Dragunov it
has a two-part handguard. Take those off. And then we have a short-stroke
gas piston system here where gas is tapped off the barrel here, comes
into this tube, it's going to push this piston back. There is the vent hole, so once it moves
all the way back excess gas vents out. That short-stroke piston comes back
here, through the rear sight block, and hits the front of the bolt carrier right
there, you can see the discoloured spot. So this as a system is
just like the Dragunov, except the Dragunov has an adjustable gas port,
the Al-Kadesih does not, it has one fixed gas setting. And then we also have a
Dragunov-style muzzle device here, which ... like the real Dragunov
this is ... left-hand threaded on. And there's quite a lot of threading on there. There we go, there's the muzzle device. And we can go ahead and
take the gas system apart. Pull this part of the piston out. Then lift up this latch and we can
unscrew this section of the piston. There we go, that comes out. And then the gas piston itself
and its return spring come out. Now at the beginning I mentioned that this is
essentially a Dragunov made on AK tooling. And so let's take a look
at all the various features. Right up at the front we have essentially an AK front
sight tower, AK front sight, that is not a Dragunov. It's important to remember that the
Dragunov is not an AK derivative, it was designed
completely independently. And so even the parts that could theoretically
interchange between the two designs were designed and built independently
and they are not the same. So a Dragunov front sight (you can tell them
because they're fully hooded among other things) is not an AK sight, this is an AK sight. The gas block is unique of course, because it's got a short-stroke gas piston system
instead of the long-stroke of an AK. Now when we get back here to the front
trunnion you can see that this is very similar to a standard AK front trunnion, in
particular a Yugoslav M70 front trunnion. We've got our rear sight block
here, also looks very AK-like. Rear sight leaf, very much
an AK rear sight leaf. And a trunnion here that is riveted
onto a stamped sheet metal receiver. That's how the M70 was built, or at least the
stamped M70s that the Iraqis were making. If we take a look at the bolt, this is
clearly the carrier from a Dragunov. But our bolt is essentially an AK bolt. It actually rotates the opposite
direction to the Dragunov, and that's because it has a cam cut
that is essentially an AK operating cam. You can see here by the way, they've ...
reduced the inside diameter to reduce weight and to give a place for gunk
and sand to stay out of the way. But this operates just like an AK, it rotates
and locks like an AK, not like a Dragunov. Back here we have the rear trunnion that the
stock is screwed into, there's a screw there. And there is a screw on
the bottom of the pistol grip. By the way, this red pistol grip cap is
distinctive and unique to the Al-Kadesih. They put it on basically all
of them, not really sure why. It is plastic, it might be there to protect the
toe of the bottom of the pistol grip there. If it's not that then frankly
I'm not sure what its purpose is. But what's interesting is that the
rear trunnion is actually riveted (you can see it right here on the inside) the rear trunnion itself is riveted to a [pair of]
reinforcing plates, ... one on each side. Which are then in turn
riveted to the actual receiver. So why they didn't just have ... an AK-style rear trunnion
and ... have the receiver come all the way back, not entirely clear to me, but I'll
tell you what my guess would be. My guess would be that the
stamping tooling that Al-Qadisiyah had was designed for an AK, and this is
about as long as they could make it. And so without having to get new tooling,
the only way they could make a longer receiver like this was to make the
back of it as a separate piece. A quick look at the fire control group
here, it is of course hammer fired. There's our hammer,
just like the Dragunov, and like the original correct proper Dragunovs
it actually has a safety sear. So this is the safety sear, until the bolt
pushes that down the hammer can't drop. So that ensures that the gun
does not fire out of battery. Now in some designs that is ... an essential
component of a full-auto fire control mechanism. (I do not want the hammer to
come out here, there we go.) Got our hammer pin
coming a little bit loose there. Can't happen when it's in the gun
because the receiver holds that in place. But anyway, in some designs the
safety sear is actually an auto-sear, so that it will automatically release the
hammer when this is pushed down by the bolt. The Dragunov is one of those semi-automatic
only designs that only ever was designed to be semi-automatic, that uses this to
ensure the gun doesn't fire out of battery. And it's held in the gun by these
two hooks that lock onto this. This little guy right here is the
bolt hold open, it is spring loaded. And when this tab on the back of the
magazine, which is connected to the follower, when it pushes up it pushes this tab up. Which
interferes with the bolt and locks the bolt open. So that's how Dragunovs
lock open, which AKs do not. And there you go, there is a
disassembled Iraqi Al-Kadesih (minus the bit of the muzzle that
I couldn't quite fit into the shot). One of the interesting things about Tabuk
production, and by extension Al-Kadesih production, is that these weapons were often as much for
status as they were for formal military equipment. The Iraqis never manufactured nearly enough
Tabuk rifles to actually fully equip the Iraqi Army. ... Saddam wanted to have the prestige
of having his own domestic arms industry, but it was expensive, there were
quality control issues at Al-Qadisiyah, and it was a lot cheaper to just buy surplus
AKs from elsewhere around the world. And so the majority of the Iraqi Army
was actually armed with a mixture of Romanian, Hungarian, Russian, Chinese,
Polish and other surplus AKs and AKMs. The Tabuks only
equipped a limited number of typically higher status units,
like guys in the Republican Guard. The Al-Kadesih sniper
rifles are the same way. It's not like every unit had its own
dedicated marksman with an Iraqi Dragunov. Instead the majority of these rifles, if we
judge from the known surviving examples, appear to be gold-plated
presentation guns. And that was definitely a
significant element of production. It's also worth pointing out that there are a batch
of these guns that appear to have been made in 2003 that are marked with a
little plaque inside the stock here and marked on the receiver
side with the word "Training". But it's written in Arabic and so if you
don't speak Arabic, or if you don't read it, you're not going to be able to recognise what
that phrase is and you might have a whoopsie. Which actually happened a number
of times in Iraq with Coalition troops test firing guns that looked like this, but
they had this neat little plaque on them, which proceeded to explode when fired. And it's because they are essentially the equivalent
of drill purpose guns, they're training-only guns. And there was actually
a hole drilled in the barrel, but underneath the handguard
where it's not immediately visible. And so this is the sort of thing where if you're
an Iraqi soldier, you look at this and you go, "Oh, it says training right on it,
I probably shouldn't fire that." But if you're an American or British or other
Coalition soldier and you pick it up and you're like, "Oh hey, it's an Iraqi sniper rifle,
let's see how it shoots." Kabluey, blows the handguard apart,
and hopefully not your hand with it. So, something to be aware of on these. The gold-plated guns, as I said, do appear to be
actually a small [majority] of the surviving examples. Part of that is probably a bias that people are more likely to hang onto
a gold-plated rifle than a standard looking one. But we can tell just from these
numbers, even if they are biased, that there was a substantial production
of these specifically made as gifts and presentations and sort of honour
guns, instead of standard issue rifles. So a big thanks to the viewer who sent me
this one on loan so that I could film it for you. The total number of these that survive
is tiny, a couple of dozen at most. ... If you go and look at Miles Vining's
Silah Report article on these, he has something like 15 known examples. Not including this one, so
this is another one on his list. At any rate, very cool to get a chance to take
a look at this, these are very hard to find today. Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.
