Know Your Weapons: The “Toophan”; The Iranian TOW Missile Knockoff

The CIA program to supply Arab rebels in Syria has made TOW anti-tank guided missiles a nearly ubiquitous sight in media coming from the conflict. But the United States might not be the only country waging a covert war with TOW (or TOW-like) missiles in the Middle East.

Iranian reverse-engineered TOW anti-tank guided missiles, dubbed “Toophan,” have been been sighted headed toward Yemen with additional suspected appearances in Iraq and Syria — all in the hands of Tehran’s allies and proxy groups.

Iran’s production of reverse-engineered TOW missiles is no great secret. In official news outlets, documentaries and on Iran’s official arms export website, the Islamic Republic has touted its production of a series of different Toophan missiles derived from TOW variants.

It has produced at least a handful of different Toophan models, including the Toophan 1 through 3. According to Armament Research Services, the three systems appear to copy the TOW BGM-71A, BGM-71C and BGM-71F missiles. Iran makes two other variants, dubbed the Toophan-5 and Qaem.

In addition to the basic infantry launch platform, Iran has equipped some of its vehicles to fire the missiles. The basic Safir 4×4 tactical vehicle often appears in military parades equipped with a Toophan launcher.

Iran’s unhelpfully-named Toufan-2 helicopter, based on the Bell Sea Cobra, also appears able to fire Toophan anti-tank missiles.

Read the Remainder at War is Boring

Learning From Terrorist Tactics: Preparing For Subterranean Warfare

I posted an article last year on Subterranean Warfare in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank and it now looks like this nasty type of fighting is definitely going to be part of the landscape in the battle zones in Syria and Iraq as well. -SF

 

Last year, members of Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, dug a tunnel leading to the Syrian Air Force Intelligence building in Aleppo and detonated a massive bomb in an attempt to destroy the facility. Reported globally, this event was by no means a rarity in the ongoing Syrian civil war. As Benjamin Runkle warned last year, the United States and its allies must prepare for the subterranean future of warfare. His article was a broad and useful overview of the various threat actors using tunneling to negate the advantages that airpower and other technologies provide to Western militaries. As America increases its military involvement in Iraq and Syria, a more detailed look at the military significance of such structures is warranted. As of February of this year, there were nearly 4,500 U.S. troops in Iraq. Regardless of the merits of further intervening in the conflict, it is a fact that the United States and its allies are sending increasing amounts of troops to the region. Whatever the intentions of American leaders, this expanded presence is almost certain to result in greater contact with a variety of hostile forces. Al-Nusra, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), the Syrian government, and other factions in the war have all used tunnels to great effect throughout the conflict. U.S. and allied militaries must thus understand and prepare for subterranean warfare.

The Subterranean Landscape in Iraq and Syria

Both Syrian regime and rebel forces have burrowed a vast series of tunnels into the area around Damascus. Given the ever-shifting tide of battle, these structures have become neutral parts of the battlespace, rather than dedicated mobility corridors for one side or the other. Teams of up to 300 insurgents have labored with shovels and pick axes to dig these tunnels. The Free Syrian Army has reportedly even employed architects to design a tunnel, which it used to infiltrate a government military base near the town of Erbin. Outside of the Syrian capital, regime forces claimed they had destroyed a subterranean network near Harasta in June 2015. This massive underground structure includedtunnels up to 200 meters in length equipped with lighting and ventilation ducts. Later that year, ISIL built an elaborate series of passageways in the border town of Sinjar during its battle with Kurdish forces. Likely constructed with jackhammers and hand tools, the network featured multiple exit points fortified with sandbags to protect against American-dropped ordnance. The Islamist group also smashed holes in walls between buildings to allow covered, aboveground transit in the face of withering American airstrikes. As part of ISIL’s tenacious defense of the area south of Mosul, the group has constructed an underground “city within a city” to protect its fighters against advancing Iraqi government troops.

Tunneling in the Offense

The various warring factions in Syria and Iraq have not only used burrowing below ground as a defensive or force protection measure, but they have also used tunnels to deliver troops and explosives against their enemies. When they threatened the Iraqi capital in the late summer of 2014, ISIL made use of Saddam-era subterranean routes to evade Iraqi Security Forces, hide from their aircraft, and deny them rear-area security. In the battle for Homs in November 2015, al-Nusra built passageways 15 meters underground, some of which stretched for 3 kilometers. According to Syrian government soldiers, the primary purpose of these structures was to allow insurgents to encroach on regime fortifications by maneuvering in a covered fashion.

In an almost herculean effort, another rebel group reportedly spent seven months building a tunnel under the Syrian Army’s Wadi Deif base. Instead of using the subterranean passageway to deploy troops, the rebels used it to detonatealmost 60 metric tons of explosives in May 2014 and kill at least 20 soldiers. Possibly following the lead of other groups, ISIL detonated six metric tons of explosives under an Iraqi army headquarters in Ramadi in March of 2015. The insurgents had spent two months digging a 240 meter tunnel under the structure. Syrian regime forces have likewise maneuvered toward rebel checkpoints under the surface to detonate explosives below their unsuspecting targets.

Read the Remainder at War on the Rocks

ISIS Corner: Is the U.S. Lilly-Dipping in Syria?

Lilly-Dipping: A Term used to describe a person who does not place their entire paddle in the water when paddling. In Military circles, Lilly-Dipping is synonymous with the phrase “Doing something Half-Ass” Or Not putting forth 100% effort.

The great, long-awaited counterattack against ISIS has finally begun. The offensive that spans Syria and western Iraq is targeting the ISIS-held cities of Raqqa and Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city.

For a variety of reasons, the much ballyhooed “final offensive” against ISIS is moving with all the speed of a medieval army of drunken foot soldiers and all the audacity of a lady’s garden party.

As a former soldier and war correspondent, I find the spectacle both pathetic and weird.  Back in my army days, our tough sergeants used to call such behavior “lilly-dipping.” There’s no risk that this pathetic campaign will go down in the annals of military history.

In fact, the whole business smells to high heaven.

In the west, the Syrian government and Kurdish troops, stiffened by US, British and French special forces, and backed by US close air support, are inching towards ISIS-controlled Raqqa, a dreary, one-camel town that sits on some strategic roads. Syrian troops just retook Palmyra, once the desert capital of the fabled Queen Zenobia. The battle was hardly a second Stalingrad: ISIS fighters piled into their pickups and skedaddled.

Washington has been slowly massing Iraqi and US forces for the campaign against Mosul, an important city of  64,000 that is the gateway to Iraq’s northern oilfields. Arabs and Kurds have been battling over Mosul for decades.  Iraq’s Kurds, now allied to the US, are set on cementing their hold on Mosul and its oil-producing region…and probably expelling many of its Arab inhabitants. The Turks, who once ruled this region, are angry as hornets and fearful that an independent Kurdish state may be proclaimed at Mosul.

To get to Mosul, all the US-led forces need do is start their vehicles and drive a few hours up the highway to that city. Iraq has excellent roads thanks to its murdered president, Saddam Hussein. US-led Iraqi government and Kurdish forces are similarly close to Mosul from their bases in western Iraq.

If Germans or Russians were running this mini-war, they would have taken Mosul last year.

What strikes me as so curious is that in reality the dreaded ISIS is little more than a bunch of 20-something kids without any military training or professional command except for some veterans of Saddam’s disbanded army.

ISIS has almost no artillery and only light anti-aircraft guns. Their supplies are scanty; their communications listened into by nearly everyone. US, British, French, warplanes buzz overhead, ready to blast anything that moves in the flat, empty desert terrain.

In WWII the Germans would have sent a  couple of jeeps commanded by sergeants roaring into Mosul, ordering its defenders “hands up, thrown down your weapons, and surrender. Schnell!”

This how the audacious Germans took bridges and towns across Holland, Belgium and Yugoslavia. A single jeep load of German soldiers reportedly took Belgrade, the Yugoslav capital.

The notion that a rabble of 20-something ISIS kids can stand up to highly trained heavily armed western troops and their native auxiliaries is absurd. ISIS is what the Ottomans used to call, “bashi-bazooks,” armed street thugs used for looting and attacking civilians.

The small Russian air contingent in Syria has proven far more effective than the US and its allies. The mighty US Air Force has continued pinprick attacks on ISIS positions in what has become a pantomime war. It’s almost as if the western powers are playing make-believe in Syria.

Perhaps they are.  The Saudis and Turks, both very close US allies, have been arming and supplying ISIS in order to topple the Damascus-based Shia regime of President Bashar Assad. Washington has gone along with this covert fight while lamenting the terrors of “terrorism.”

Washington’s strategy in Syria has become so comically inept that the Pentagon and CIA are actually backing rival Syrian jihadist groups who are fighting with one another. The Russians are mocking Washington. Who can blame them.

The Obama administration is clearly reluctant to use “force majeure” against ISIS.

So it continues to tip-toe and lilly-dip in Syria and Iraq, likely assuring that the US will eventually get stuck in another big Mideast conflict.

Read the Original Article at LEW Rockwell

Crusader Corner: ISIS Uses Mustard Gas in Syria

Islamic State militants attacked Syrian army troops with mustard gas in an offensive against a Syrian military airport in the eastern province of Deir al-Zor that borders Iraq, state media said on late Monday.

Syrian state media did not disclose how many casualties were sustained in the latest drive by the hardline fundamentalist Sunni militants to capture the heavily defended airport located south of Deir al Zor city, whose main neighborhoods are under the militants control.

“The terrorists fired rockets carrying mustard gas,” a statement said on state owned Ikhbariyah television station.

Deir al-Zor is a strategic location. The province links Islamic State’s de facto capital in Raqqa with its fighters in Iraq.

Reuters could not independently verify the media reports.

Amaq news agency, which is close to the militants, had earlier said Islamic State fighters had launched a wide scale attack on Jufrah village near the airport in which it said two of its suicide bombers rammed their vehicles into army defenses causing “tens of dead”.

“The battles continue on more than front and posts and we pray to Allah (God) victory for his Mujahdeen (holy warriors),” an official statement by the militants said.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitor which tracks violence across the country, said the militants had advanced with heavy aerial strikes aimed at repelling their offensive.

The Syrian army backed by heavy Russian air strikes was able last January to drive back the hardline militants from several villages near the airport but has so far failed to dislodge them.

Separately, the Observatory said fighting flared on several frontlines in the major northern city of Aleppo which is divided between government and rebel held sectors.

Rebel shelling of Kurdish YPG outposts in Sheikh Maqsoud neighborhood caused several casualties, the monitor said.

The Syrian army had earlier said that at least four hundred al Qaeda affiliated Nusra Front led militants fully equipped with heavy arms staged a major attack on army outposts in the Aleppo countryside.

The army statement also said at least eight civilians were killed in mortar attacks by rebels on residential areas of Sheikh Maqsoud with scores injured.

A fragile “cessation of hostilities” truce has held in Syria for over a month as the various parties to the conflict try to negotiate an end to Syria’s civil war.

But the truce excludes Islamic State and the al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front. Air and land attacks by Syrian and allied forces continue in parts of Syria where the government says the groups are present.

Read the Original Article at Reuters

Putin’s Attack Choppers and Merc’s are Winning the War for Assad

The George W. Bush parallel was lost on very few analysts when Vladimir Putin proudly announced that he was withdrawing a significant amount of Russia’s forces from Syria because their “mission is accomplished.” The announcement came just four days after the Atlantic published an overview of “The Obama Doctrine,” wherein U.S. President Barack Obama told journalist Jeffrey Goldberg that Russia was “bleeding,” “overextended,” and that Putin had made a terrible mistake. In both Syria and Ukraine, Obama argued, the Russian ruler had pursued policies that made his country weaker.

“The notion that somehow Russia is in a stronger position now, in Syria or in Ukraine, than they were before they invaded Ukraine or before he had to deploy military forces to Syria is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of power in foreign affairs or in the world generally. Real power means you can get what you want without having to exert violence,” the U.S. president said.

Yet there was Putin, proudly proclaiming the opposite. According to him, Russia could draw down its mission in Syria because it had achieved its goals. The White House, and the U.S. intelligence community, appeared completely surprised at the announcement of Russia’s drawdown. Once again, Vladimir Putin had defied American expectations and seemingly came out on top.

Putin’s announcement was filled with lies and distortions, but one glaring truth underscored his words — unlike Bush’s now-infamous declaration from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, the Russian president indeed may have accomplished his mission.

Read the Remainder at Foreign Policy