#Is

In what would certainly make the gun makers of Darra Adam Khel blush with professional embarrassment, a recent so-called Islamic State of Khurasan (IS entity in eastern Afghanistan) propaganda video showed fighters of the group engaging enemy Taliban fighters with a craft produced anti-materiel rifle. The rifle is extremely rudimentary, reminiscent of similarly constructed craft-produced rifles coming out of Iraq and Syria from workshops around the region.

Conflict Armament Research has released a report featuring the results of in-person findings of what the so-called Islamic State has been using in the past three years. These findings (40,000 items, 845 small arms) have resulted from personal visits to the frontlines and carefully scrutinizing captured weapons caches. If you can, I would highly recommend  reading it yourself over on the organization’s website in the PDF form. We are going to summarize some of the more relevant findings of the report when it comes to small arms use and development here in this essay.

We previously discussed the small arms capabilities of the so-called Islamic State-affiliated Maute group, we will proceed to cover the opposing Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) that have been successful in crushing the rebel uprising. Despite this success, there is still a rocky road ahead of the security forces when it comes to their task at hand. A number of these high-quality photographs are from a photo essay by David Sim on the International Business Times.

The war in Syria and Iraq has seen the development of a whole range of scratchbuilt and improvised weapons that are as ingenious as they are destructive. Recently, a kind of serially-produced rocket launcher has come to light as part of Da’ish (ISIS) propaganda, which appears to demonstrate a capability to serially produce clandestine weapons of a fairly high degree of sophistication. The weapon, a multipurpose missile launcher with a high explosive warhead, is unassuming and appears roughly equivalent to the US AT4, though cruder. It is a simple tube with almost no fittings or sights, a carrying/support handle, and a safety pin securing a fold-out firing grip.

Soon after the release of the so-called Islamic State’s marksmen shots video ( discussed in-depth here), the terrorist organization released another video but this montage focused on the Sinai peninsula in Egypt. The largest difference between the two is the enemy faced and the tactical employment of the IS marksmen teams. In the Sinai IS affiliated shooters are facing troops who are heavily armed compared with the Kurds in Kirkuk. Although these troops are better armed, their counter-sniper tactics, behavior, and reactions under fire aren’t that much better than the Kurdish volunteers that were seen earlier. As an example, we are seeing Egyptian troops at the very same positions and outposts taking far too many casualties than they should be.

Footage from Iraq is showing the Korean company S&T Motiv’s (previously Daewoo Precision) K2C select fire carbine being used by both Iraqi special operations troops from the Golden Brigade against the Islamic State, and by the Islamic State themselves. The Golden Brigade is one of three brigades apart of an Iraqi special operations force, very akin to the U.S. Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment as opposed to a JSOC or SOCOM outfit.

The Czech Republic has announced that it will donate obsolete vz. 58 rifles, both new and used, to the Iraqi and Kurdish regional government. The vz. 58 is an unusual assault rifle often confused with the famous Kalashnikov pattern of rifles, but very different from that family. Jane’s reports: