Combat footage from the Army of Conquest.
New footage from Syria shows a battle between the al-Nusra allied Army of Conquest and the Syrian government. The Washington Post has more background on the battle here.
For those of you that can't watch the video, I'll summarize. A large group of fighters are behind a large earthen berm. A decent number of fighters are on the top of the berm firing machine guns at enemy positions across a field. A old Russian T-62 tank arrives for support. About 20 fighters run over the berm, screaming "Allah Akbar", naturally, and take cover behind the tank. Using the tank as cover the troops advance to a building where they stack up to attack further. The tank comes back and the whole process starts over again.
So why post this video? Well it shows how good these fighters actually are. I saw a fairly disciplined group of fighters using proper fire and maneuver tactics. There was a little bit of spray and pray, but it only seemed to happen when the situation warranted it. Full auto fire from a rifle is justified if you are using it for suppressing fire. In addition, the guys with the machine guns on the berm were fairly disciplined in their fire. Instead of full auto madness they fired in short controlled bursts. And there was quite a bit of incoming fire those guys were charging into.
They also used their lone tank fairly effectively. From what I can tell it seems it is either damaged or out of ammo. I never saw it fire its main gun and it's turret seems to be at odd angle. It's very possible that the tank was damaged in some way and they couldn't fire it's main gun. But that doesn't make it useless. Indeed, the fighters use the tank as literal armor during the assault. Sure, they had a bunch of guys really close together that could have been wiped out with one RPG hit, but they made themselves safe from small arms and machine gun fire.
Another thing I have noticed while watching this and other combat footage throughout the various wars recently is how easy it is to root for the guys in the video. These guys were al-Nusra affiliates and members of the Army of Conquest. That means they are literally al-Qaeda. They are very bad people and normally I would like to see them wiped out. But when I was watching them I couldn't help but to want to see them succeed. That's the power of propaganda. A compelling image can always trump reason, if the footage is good enough.
And this footage was pretty good. Perhaps not the most dramatic images to come out of the Syrian war, but it least showed that the Army of Conquest knows what they were doing. And it also showed that they have courage. I know people always hate to admit that the enemy can have courage but what else would you call charging over the top of cover to fight? Sure they had machine gun support and a tank for backup, but it was still lucky that nobody seem to have gotten hurt except that guy that ran away from the tank in the beginning.
I'm always conflicted about posting combat footage. Sometimes they can be pretty graphic and other times you can be spreading propaganda. Still, I think it's important to show what modern combat is like for those fighting it. It's way different then what shows up in Hollywood. I think if more people watched these combat videos then less people would believe the myths that Hollywood likes to put out about warfare. And I always feel that people have the duty to bare witness to what is going on in the world.
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