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ISIS uses bearded mannequins as decoys
[ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] ISIS is using wooden replicas of tanks and Humvees in a bid to subvert an air campaign by the US-led military coalition supporting Iraqi forces in the djinn-infested Mosul
... the home of a particularly ferocious and hairy djinn...
operations, even using bearded mannequins to simulate Death Eater fighters.

The Iraqi army captured a handful of the mockups last week at a training site it retook from the group north of Mosul, ISIS’s last major stronghold in the country, which government forces have almost surrounded but only breached so far from one direction.

When seen close up, the models resemble toys but from a long distance they might be mistaken for real vehicles.

"As our troops advanced towards the areas we were charged with liberating, ISIS used tanks and vehicles made of wood to divert the military planes," Lieutenant Colonel Abbas al-Azaji said on Sunday, using an Arabic acronym for ISIS.

It is not clear how effective the mockups have been at thwarting aerial bombardment, which has been essential to the Iraqi forces’ ground campaign to roll back ISIS from large swathes of territory it seized in 2014.

Baghdad-based front man US Air Force Col. John Dorrian said the coalition had been tracking ISIS’s use of such decoy vehicles for a while.

"We call it tactical deception. ISIS has been doing it and that’s certainly a tactic that enemies like to use," he said.

"It is actually not as troubling as a lot of the other things we’ve seen," he said, like setting fire to a sulphur plant and igniting oil wells south of Mosul.

Also found at the training site were two large armored vehicles the bandidos holy warriors had used for assaulting enemy positions, and the blown out remains of more than a dozen vehicle-borne bombs which Iraqi forces had disabled.


Posted by: Fred 2016-11-15
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=473176