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By Stijn Mitzer and Joost Oliemans
Turkmenistan has accumulated an exotic arsenal of armoured fighting vehicles (AFVs) acquired from a
colourful range of countries worldwide. Intriguingly, at least some of those
acquisitions appear to stem from an intention of increasing ties with a
particular country rather than of actually fulfilling a genuine military
requirement for that type of equipment. This 'friendship through arms' policy comes at the cost of
an increasingly complicated logistic system that by now has to source
spare parts from nine different countries for Turkmenistan's fleet of
infantry mobility vehicles (IMVs) alone!