It’s easy to think ISIS might possibly know what they’re doing; I mean, it’s not like they don’t have significant battlefield victories to their credit.
However, and on the other hand, it’s clear that the majority of ISIS fighters are recruits given rudimentary military training and then sent into a combat; and anyone who’s ever been in battle knows that without a great deal of training the endeavour will seem extremely difficult and confusing.
So it’s always been hard to figure out exactly how ISIS has pulled off so many conquests. To go further, it’s been hard to resist buying into the idea of ISIS as this mythical, virtually unstoppable fighting force.
Until now, that is.
A video recently published on the Internet by Vice News shows a first-person view of an ISIS attack and Kurdish lines north of Mosul which took place last December. (Go here for the full story behind the battle).
You have to see the video to believe how inept the fighters are: they can’t find magazines, get confused by which rocket to fire, and generally have no clue what they’re doing.
The worst of the fighters is a man called Abu Hajaar, who can’t stop firing his machine gun into the cab of his own vehicle. (Abu Hajaar is now a celebrity on the Internet, famous for being the worst fighter of all time.)
But it’s also the planning that’s a little lacking. These guys were sent to essentially rush forward into the guns with the kind of tactical stupidity not seen in the Western world since the Great War. All the ISIS fighters died in the attack.
So it’s not impossible that a Canadian sniper killed Abu Hajaar.
In any case, the upshot is this: on a battlefield full of untrained fighters you can get away with incompetence, but when skilled Western (or Iranian, or Russian) trainers show up and teach one side how to fire rocket-propelled grenades and anti-tank weapons, well, that can tip the scales decisively.
And so there goes the myth of ISIS.
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