“And even if the rebels do have the weapons, it is unclear whether they have the training to operate them effectively against Assad’s air forces in the immediate future.”
I think that the frightening aspect of these weapons is that they require very little training, except that the target can’t be too high.
I know we’ve been worried about these getting out there, but it seems technically possible to build one with a “shelf life”, and the ability to use GPS so that they disable the electronics permanently if taken outside of a given set of coordinates. Without the “guidance stuff”, it’s a rocket with a report in a tube.
All the ones built to date do have a shelf life. It’s why we weren’t too worried about the Stingers in Afghanistan - they’d gone past their use-by date.
I hope what Turkey supplied were some ex-Soviet/Russian Strelas. Those don’t work very well when they’re new - not to mention they had the occasional wonderful habit of “explode-on-launch” which made them very unpopular with regular users. They didn’t get better with age.