After a brief hiatus, the infamous Mahama Tactical training team is back in the spotlight again. The group’s former leader, Uzbek national Abu Rofiq was killed a while back and since then the team appears to have lost some key leadership. Since then, a Twitter account under the handle of Salman Belarus started posting older media of the group on April 19th and has continued to grow to include much newer material, in addition to posting about the group coming back into the picture.

For some background on the group, check out our earlier posts that first came online about the existence of the group and then about its constantly changing TTPs.

Malhama Tactical is going to come back, very soon you will see new videos inshaaLlah. pic.twitter.com/er38ATJSqE

— Abu Salman Belarus (@SalmanBelorus) June 14, 2018

One important point here is that the group has even posted a link to donating to the tactical team via BitCoin. This isn’t very groundbreaking because numerous insurgencies and terrorist groups have begun depending on BitCoin as an anonymous form of payment for their operations. But the fact that the group is openly posting donation links is somewhat troubling, or at least very foolhardy on the part of their operational security habits.

Donate for our instructor team of Malhama Tactical, be with us in our endeavours. Anonymously and safely. Bitcoin wallet:

Of note to us at TFB are the latest small arms trends and techniques within the group. On June 16th the group posted a link to a video on the Russian social media sharing site VK.com. This is most likely because anything they put on Youtube will most likely be taken down by Youtube admin or reported.

About half of the video is simply footage that came out before. But whenever this crest appears in the upper righthand corner of the screen, the footage has been newly shot.

Craft-produced suppressors have been mounted to several of the AKM rifles used in the video, in addition, it appears that there has been a transition to red dot sights, most likely of low-cost Chinese manufacture available on the open market. It just goes to show that the smart insurgents and rebels (there are many dumb ones) understand the value of suppressed rifles and quick acquisition sights just like any modern NATO military does.

Another change appears to be a large presence of Glock 19s that didn’t feature as much in earlier media coming out of the group. Note that the first image has been flipped on the horizontal, showing a left-handed, folding stock AKM variant whereas these really don’t exist.

Note the red dot optic.

One of the scenes shows a combined arms battle in which the group is working alongside an old Soviet tank behind a berm. The group takes a casualty which is dragged down the berm from his firing position. Note that on the PKM variant there is a modified forward grip attached to the gas tube. An earlier video showed the group with this as well.

And of course, we have a U.S. Military surplus M16A2 diverted from the forces it was originally meant to arm.