Ed Nash - Kurdish Armour Against ISIS: YPG/SDF tanks, technicals and AFVs in the Syrian Civil War, 2014–19 (New Vanguard)

The Arab Spring, which broke out in 2011, engulfed Syria rapidly, leading to a conflict that had begun with a burning desire to overthrow the regime of the Assad family, but soon turned into a brutal civil war. International intervention in the conflict added to the confusion of competing ethnic and tribal loyalties. It was the sudden and violent rise in 2014 of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), however, which propelled the Kurdish forces seeking to resist its advance in Syria into the spotlight of the worlds media.

Following ISISs seizure of the city of Raqqa from the Syrian opposition in mid-January 2014, a major event in the rise of the Islamist group was its unexpected capture of Mosul, Iraqs second largest city, in the north-west of the country, in early June. This victory followed an earlier ISIS success in Iraq when it had taken Fallujah in January. These victories not only enabled ISIS to expand as a military force: it attained the authority, in the eyes of its supporters, of a new proto-state in the Middle East, a status enhanced when its appointed leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi proclaimed the foundation of an Islamic caliphate in a speech in Mosul on 29 June 2014, allegedly giving him power over 1.5 billion Muslims.

Two maps showing the territorial situation of the YPG in early September 2014 (Map 1) and of the SDF in late March 2019 (Map 2).

The Caliphate did not respect international borders and began a swift march across Syrian territory, although it largely avoided those areas still controlled by government forces in the west of the country. While in northern Iraq it was the Kurdish Peshmerga forces who resisted the advance of ISIS, in Syria it was the YPG ( Yekneyn Parastina Gel, Peoples Protection Units) which stood in the way of the murderous rampage of the black flag Islamists: from a desperate fight for survival in 2014, they went on the offensive in 2015, securing final victory in March 2019.

While much of the fighting in the Syrian Civil War between the Kurdish YPG militia and ISIS was conducted by light infantry, the open terrain of northern Syria meant that mobile forces were to play a critical part in the key battles and operations that saw the final defeat of ISIS in Syria in March 2019. Although only available in modest numbers when compared to other post-Cold War conflicts, an assortment of armoured vehicles nonetheless played an important role in the conflict in fact, their limited availability caused them at times to exert a disproportionate effect on morale on both sides.

Given the open terrain that characterizes large parts of northern and eastern Syria, armoured fighting vehicles (AFVs) became an increasingly important element in Kurdish units. In the first year of the conflict between the Kurds and the Islamists, the employment of home-made tanks and other improvised armoured fighting vehicles (IAFVs) demonstrated that despite the availability of anti-tank weapons, AFVs however lightly armoured were still essential in military operations. By the same token, the initial sweeping success of ISIS had been largely a result of the vehicles it had been able to capture from the Iraqi Army.

An interesting pair of vehicles in YPG service preparing for an operation, Abdul Aziz, October 2015. Both were captured from ISIS, which had seized them in Iraq: on the left is a Russian-designed MTLB, dating from Soviet-era supplies to Saddam Hussein; right is an American-made M1117 security vehicle, provided as part of the huge shipments the United States supplied to the post-Saddam Iraqi Army following the invasion of 2003. Both have been fitted with crude, open-top turrets, providing the machine-gunner with better protection than a simple gun shield; the M1117 has been equipped with a 14.5mm KPV machine gun. (Ed Nash)

The Arab Spring of 2011 saw protests and violence spread across the Arab world as tensions and dissatisfaction with autocratic governments in the region exploded. While no Arab country escaped without at least some disruption, none has suffered as much as Syria. Governed for decades by the Assad family dynasty, unrest in the country erupted into violence in 2011 as rebel military units sought to overthrow the repressive government of Bashar al-Assad. Very soon war was raging between the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and the loyalists of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA), both aided by outside powers with their own agendas in the region. As the conflict unfolded, Russia came to the aid of Assad, anxious not to lose its military bases in the country.

This conflagration meant that many areas effectively fell under local control as the central government lost its grip and focussed on its own survival, protecting its strongholds in Damascus and along the coast. Syria has always been home to a mix of races, religious outlooks and tribes; very rapidly, a kaleidoscope of different militias emerged to protect neighbourhoods and territories from other groups. Many of these were founded on religious or ethnic grounds, such as the Syriac Military Council (SMC), created to protect the Christian Assyrians.