Steve asked the question here. So did Grim.
This is all the answer I can provide with the references I have available to me on the road.
Many, many nations produce variants of the RPG 7 round. There are differences, some subtle, some not, in manufacture and fuzing that are clues to origin (at least of the machinery - but machinery can move. An example is in SKS's - there are SKS's produced by East European countries which were made on Chinese machinery - there are differences in machining that indicate the origin of the machinery, but are not conclusive as to origin of the weapon itself.
Markings, especially these markings, are just... paint.
I've seen some arguments that if it was Iranian, wouldn't it be marked in Farsi?
Maybe. Depends on if it was produced for local consumption or export. But english and cyrillic are generally the alphabets of choice right now for ordnance markings, regardless of who produces it - because it's easier to sell/give to other users that way.
India Ordnance Factory and Pakistan Ordnance Factory marks their muntions in english, many times (but not always) following NATO marking rules.
The Palestinian weapons shops mark their stuff in Arabic. The Egyptians... use English and Arabic. The Chinese use English and Chinese.
And when the markings are paint - they can be whatever whoever wants them to be for whatever purpose.
There are three easily supportable theories based on the scant actual evidence available to me, yet they are mutually exclusive explanations.
1. It's exactly what we say it is.
2. It's Iranian ammo. Produced for export, and marked in a way that the customer wanted (nice thing about paint, vice stampings). Or even produced as part of an intel op to trap us (in that case, to look like US-style marking conventions) or for just the reasons we're seeing - to provide plausible deniability.
3. It's Iranian ammo as indicated by fuzing or other manufacturing clues. I can't rule on that definitively yet, I don't have access to all my references, and they may not answer that question. Or it's not. And *our* guys put the markings on it as part of our own info-op. Which means we possibly didn't do our homework very well. Which, while sad, is also plausible, but I think not terribly likely.
Another clue can be the composition of the explosives, but I simply don't have data on that other than what's been reported.
The blogs seem to be running with it based on their attitudes about the war.
Me? Insufficient data at this point for a definitive answer. *All* of those theories I put up there are plausible and supportable. I tend to Occam's Razor - the simplest answer is the best until better data comes along.
Which puts me in the "I'll take the military's word on it until better data comes along." And that data may or may not be out there - but I've got things I have to do here which will keep me from spending the day surfing or making some phone calls.
Anybody with more data, stuff it in the comments. We can 'wiki' this.
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