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Since 2011, Libya has become a hot spot of illicit weapons sales, manyof which occur through messaging applications and social media networks, according to a report released Tuesday.

The report which tracks more than 1,300 attempted online sales from 2014 to 2015 was published by the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey, and uses data collected and analyzedby the group Armament Research Services. Although its authors say that the data set is only a small fractionof illicit arms sales in Libya, the report highlights trends in the growingtrade.

Weapons from 26 countries, including the United States, China, Belgium and Turkey, were found in the 1,346 tracked sales, according to the report. Although most of the small arms were for self-defense and sporting purposes, some of the people involved in the transfers had ties to Libyan militia groups.

[Who in Libya will the U.S. send weapons to? Its complicated, says a top general.]

Whilst online trades appear to account for only a small portion of the illicit arms trade in Libya, their relative anonymity, low barrier to entry, and distributed nature are likely to pose unique challenges to law enforcement and embargo monitoring operations, Nic Jenzen-Jones, the director ofArmament Research Services, said in an email.

Last year, using the preliminary data from parts of this Small Arms Surveyworking paper, the New York Times reported that militant groups and terrorists were using social media networks such as Facebook to traffic weapons from small arms to antiaircraft missiles in Libya, Iraq, Syria and Yemen. Facebooks policy toward weapon transfers appears to be unchanged since that article. The social media company prohibits arms sales but requires users to self-report pagesinvolved in the transfers. Because many groups are secret or closed to the public, the pages often gather thousands of members and operate for months before being shut down.

Facebook did not respond to a request for comment.

The groups often make little effort to conceal the nature of their pages, according to the report, using pictures of weapons and names such as the now-removedLibyan Firearms Market. When a group is shut down, the report says, its core membership often starts another page and quickly resume trading.

The trades documented in the report are made mostly from individual sellers, although some of them are online extensions of physical arms bazaars in Libya. The report aside from monitoring the groups also draws on interviews from eight confidential sources that provide a samplingof the type of Libyans involved in the illicit arms market. Seven of them are younger than 35 and most are using the arms sales to supplement their incomes. At least one is selling weapons primarily Belgianhandguns to help pay for his education.

An engineer living in the suburbs of Tripoli and quoted in the report as Confidential Source 7 told the papersauthors that aside from the online market, weaponsare easy to get regardless of Internet connection.

With just a few phone calls, you can get a firearm starting from a 9mm to a rifle, the source said.

From 1992 to 2003, Libya was under a strict United Nations arms embargo following the countrys suspected involvement in the 1988 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, and the downing of a French airliner over Niger in 1989. According to the report, most of the weapons documented in the online trades are from the preembargo era, however some including potential covert arms supplied toMoammar Gaddafis regime also have appeared in social media groups.

[U.S. and allies ready to help arm Libyan forces against Islamic State]

Handguns, according to the report, were prevalentin the data because of Libyans desire to own concealableweapons. The report, however, stipulates that the pistols weredisproportionately represented in comparison with the majority of weapons on the Libyan small-arms market. More than 60 percentof the self-loading rifles documented were Kalashnikov variants, while 14 percent were Belgian-made FAL rifles.

The report documents three French MILAN antitank missiles, probably from a 2007 contract to Gaddafi, that were for sale online. Additionally, two German Heckler and Koch rifles, called G36s, appeared in the reports data. The serial numbers on the rifles have been removed and replaced with a numeric sequencethat doesnot match the manufacturers format and, according to Heckler and Koch, the company never shipped weapons of any type to Libya under Gaddafi.

After the Libyan revolution and NATOs intervention in 2011, the tightly controlled weapons stores of the Gaddafi regime were looted and the region was flooded withtens of thousands of small arms, including shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles. Aside from showing up on online arms markets, the weapons have appeared in conflict zones across the Middle East and northern Africa.

Related stories: U.S. established Libyan outposts with eye toward offensive against the Islamic State

Five years after uprising, Western nations prepare to intervene again in Libya

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Libya has become a hub for online arms trading, report says - Washington Post