#Chechen Jaish al Muhajireen al-Ansar using a Texan plumbing truck against regime in #Aleppo, #Syria. v @Weissenberg7 pic.twitter.com/lE5Mm7XxEg
— Military Studies (@ArmedResearch) December 15, 2014
Mounted with a cannon and leaving a trail of shells in its wake, a black pickup truck in the hands of jihadists in Syria has brought woe to a family of Texas City plumbers by way of the insignia on its driver-side door: “Mark-1 Plumbing”.
On Monday a Chechen-led group linked to the extremist group Ansar al-Deen, a sometime ally of Islamic State (Isis) and al-Nusra fighters, tweeted a photo of the black Ford F-250 in action near Aleppo. Since then, Mark Olberholtzer and his family near Houston have received hundreds of phone calls with questions and threats.
Attempts to call the Olberholtzer family, who own Mark-1 Plumbing, reached only a recorded message or a disconnected line. On Tuesday Mark Olberholtzer told the Galveston Daily News he was mystified: “How it ended up in Syria, I’ll never know.” His son Jeff similarly expressed bafflement to KHOU local news: “We had no intentions or idea that this would happen.”
“To think something we would use to pull trailers, now is being used for terror – it’s crazy. Never in my life would I think something like that,” the younger Olberholtzer told KHOU.
The Olberholtzers sold the truck in October 2013 to a nearby Houston dealership run by AutoNation, confirmed Marc Cannon, senior vice-president of AutoNation’s corporate communications. Cannon told the Guardian that AutoNation sent the truck to the Adesa auction house in Houston.
The car was sold on the auction block to a local used car dealer, though Adesa has not yet responded to requests to identify the dealer. An operator at the auction house told the Guardian the company has been bombarded by calls, and that she was surprised that neither the plumbers nor the jihadis had simply removed the logo.
From the port of Houston the Olberholtzers’ old F-250 likely made it to a dealership in eastern Europe, Africa or the Middle East, and within a few months changed hands several times before it finally reached a jihadist sympathizer. The truck then likely passed through Turkey’s porous border, which lies only a few hours’ drive from Aleppo and the chaotic battles so far removed from south-eastern Texas.
About erasing the logo, the elder Olberholtzer told the Galveston Daily News that AutoNation or one of the other middlemen “were supposed to have done it and it looks like they didn’t do it”. The plumber of 32 years said his family has received death threats and that some of the callers “are really ugly”.
“We have a secretary here, she’s scared to death. We all have families,” his son told KHOU. “We have nothing to do with terror at all.”
His father had a message to the broader world: “I just want it to go away, to tell you the truth.”
A representative of Mark-1 Plumbing told CBS News that they plan to pursue legal action to force Twitter to remove the photo. The person said that sold vehicles would “most definitely” have the logo removed henceforth.
Auction houses, which make more profit the faster they turn products, usually sell used cars quickly, and exporters are often keen to pick up unwanted vehicles from lots. Those exporters then ship used cars into the sizeable market in developing nations, where a battered Ford can find a long second life, or where scavengers can resurrect a lemon or dismantle it for parts.
