“Various news outlets, including this paper, are reporting that the beleaguered regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has, beginning Monday, fired six Scud missiles from Damascus towards rebel forces in the north. Although, just as with the murmurings of chemical weapons, we should treat these early, anonymously-sourced reports with the appropriate scepticism, this is another emerging sign of desperation by a regime that has suffered unprecedented reversals over the past three weeks.

Scuds are a family of cheap and easy short-range ballistic missiles developed by the Soviet Union in the 1960s. They were taken up enthusiastically by a variety of Soviet allies like Syria, particularly after the missile exchanges of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s demonstrated their utility as instruments of terror or – in Syria’s case – as potential delivery systems for chemical weapons. Syria probably has many hundreds of various types of Scuds, with the most advanced, the Scud-D, capable of traveling 700km.”

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