Liwa al-Tawhid fighters brave incoming fire to recover the body of a fallen comrade – Sayf al-Dawla, Aleppo – 8/23/2012

2 comments

1. Some of the combat footages from early on in the Syrian civil war seem to stand in the stark contrast to the ones from recent years. A lot of the time people actually seem to have a clue of what they’re doing in those older videos, compare that to more recent ones and you barely even see them using iron sights, let alone some form of tactics.

   I wonder if that’s due to insane attrition that all sides have seen in that conflict, where all the capable people have simply died over the years of fighting.

2. In many, perhaps most cases the correct tactical thing to do is to assess the state of the casualty from a distance versus making a second, third, and even fourth casualty that will be caused by retrieving a likely corpse. Unit leaders have to control these behaviors in unit members and coach people beforehand to create a shared understanding about it.