Video: ISIS car bombing in Syria.

The video above is reportedly a battle between ISIS and the Syrian military near Palmyra. I haven't been able to verify if it is authentic but it certainly seems real. In case the video is removed it shows what looks like a decent size unit of Syrian soldiers or militia units engaged with ISIS. I counted two main battle tanks a couple of "technicals" with heavy machine guns mounted and at least a dozen soldiers firing rifles. They all are firing at a car bomb that is quickly rushing towards their position. The bomb blew up and the video ends.

It just goes to show how hard it is to defend against these kinds of attacks. It's not like the Syrians were under equipped here. You could see the tanks firing on the car bomb but they missed. It's probably hard to hit a moving target like that with a tank but you would think that the riflemen and technicals would have been able to do something.

Still, it's very hard to stop a car bomber. You pretty much either have to destroy the engine, kill the driver(s) or detonate the explosives. That's fairly hard to do, especially for the poor riflemen in this video. It's not really that hard to hit a moving target like this, but when you are shooting a relatively small round, like the one the AK family of rifles has, it would be very difficult to stop the engine, kill the driver or detonate the bomb. Especially when you consider that ISIS often up-armors these vehicles to make them even more resistant to rifle fire. The heavy machine guns seen in the video would have a better chance but was really needed was either the tank rounds or the use of RPG's or other missiles.

Either way, it's a scary video. All I know is that I don't want to be one of those fighters going up against one of these bombs. It must be horrifying to have to fight against something like this when you know your weapons aren't powerful enough to stop it and you know how powerful the weapon is.

I am not sure if there were many casualties in this video. I think the tank was probably strong enough to have its crew survive this blast, but I bet the tank was essentially killed. Any of the infantry left out in the open or the people in the trucks would have had to been lucky to avoid death in this case...