Odds are they were there or near by, although some - if not a lot - of it could have come from Eastern Europe.
We had all sorts of WWII stuff showing up in Vietnam that had been sent to NVN from Warsaw Pact/Soviet stockpiles. I would expect lot of what remained in the former Warsaw Pact/Soviet stockpiles was sold off in the 1990s for hard currencies.
Syria took or was given a lot of German weapons after WW2, including German military advisors who set the post WW2 army up along German lines. Plenty of pictures of Panzer IVs and assorted German artillery used against the Israelis is available on the net.
There’s really no way to tell where they were stored. Probably somewhere that’s sympathetic to their cause. They would fetch a lot more on the open market, even deactivated.
eeek! i think i'm turning into a dirty hippie. i love seeing steam loco's hauling trains, vintage aircraft flying and old cars on the road/track, but seeing those weapons still in action makes me sad.
with all the different weapons being used it must be a nightmare getting the right ammo to the right people.
There seems to have been a significant number of weapons that have come from storage in eastern Europe that have found their way to the U.K., to be deactivated to U.K.spec., and then sold off over the last 20 or so years. It looks like a significant number have also ended up in Syria but a question mark remains as to exactly when.