Lee–Enfield in the context of "Magazine (firearms)"

A bayonet (from Old French bayonette, now spelt baïonnette) is a knife, dagger, sword, or spike-shaped melee weapon designed to be mounted on the end of the barrel of a rifle, carbine, musket or similar long firearm, allowing the gun to be used as an improvised spear in close combat.

The term is derived from the town of Bayonne in southwestern France, where bayonets were supposedly first used by Basques in the 17th century. From the early 17th to the early 20th century, it was an infantry melee weapon used for both offensive and defensive tactics, usually when charging in mass formations (human wave attacks). In contemporary times, bayonets are considered a weapon of last resort, and are rarely used in combat, although they are still used for ceremonial purposes (e.g, military parades).

Operation Cyclone was the code name for the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) program to arm and finance the Afghan mujahideen in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1992, prior to and during the military intervention by the USSR in support of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. The mujahideen were also supported by Britain's MI6, who conducted their own separate covert actions. The program leaned heavily towards supporting militant Islamic groups, including groups with jihadist ties, that were favored by the regime of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq in neighboring Pakistan, rather than other, less ideological Afghan resistance groups that had also been fighting the Soviet-oriented Democratic Republic of Afghanistan administration since before the Soviet intervention.

Operation Cyclone was one of the longest and most expensive covert CIA operations ever undertaken. Funding officially began with $695,000 in mid-1979, was increased dramatically to $20–$30 million per year in 1980, and rose to $630 million per year in 1987, described as the "biggest bequest to any Third World insurgency". The first CIA-supplied weapons were antique British Lee–Enfield rifles shipped out in December 1979 and by September 1986, the program included U.S.-origin state-of-the-art weaponry, such as FIM-92 Stinger surface-to-air missiles, some 2,300 of which were ultimately shipped into Afghanistan. Funding continued (albeit reduced) after the 1989 Soviet withdrawal, as the mujahideen continued to battle the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan during the First Afghan Civil War.