Al-Nusra releases drone footage of their assault on the town of Tel Bajer.

Al-Nusra, al-Qaeda's affiliate in Syria, has released drone and battle footage from their recent recapture of the town of Tel Bajer. The video shows al-Nusra troops pilling into a couple of APC's along with a tank. The group then advances into the town. The APC's deploy their troops while the tank forges on ahead alone. The tank then comes upon a major force of Iranians and their Hezbollah allies. The Iranians and the tank exchange fire as many of the Iranians flee.

Though it's clear that al-Nusra isn't quite as good at propaganda as ISIS, and their footage is nowhere near as good as the Russians can do, this was still an interesting clip. Admittedly, the Nasheed playing in the background was annoying and the gun sounds were added in, but I still thought it was cool. It shows how aggressive, even foolish, al-Nusra is in their tactics. In another video, al-Nusra advanced carefully and used cover to the best of their ability. There was none of that here. That tank just rushed in and it was very lucky that the Iranian forces they were deployed against did not have any heavy weapons. A single guy with an RPG could have ruined their whole day.

It seemed to have worked though because the Iranians fled the town shortly after this attack. In the video footage, it's clear that the Iranians are freaked out that a tank was just rushing their position like that. Though the attack was probably more dangerous then it needed to be I have to say that it seemed like it worked. Panic is always a useful ally, and it's pretty easy to see that a giant tank coming at you with guns blazing is a good way to induce it.

It's amazing to me how much combat footage is coming out of the various wars that are happening right now. The inventions of small portable cameras, like GoPro, and the proliferation of drone technology, has caused an explosion of these videos. In the past, you would almost never see videos like this, but now they are almost commonplace. I don't know if that's a good thing or not, since they are obviously great for propaganda. I'm still going to watch them though.

These combat footage videos tend to be taken down for reasons I don't quite understand. If you come across this post later and the video is gone, it can found here in this Daily Mail article. Yes, yes, it's the Daily Mail, but it's just a link to a video. And I think it's a lot less likely that they will take down the video then Youtube is.