Brutal footage from an assault near the al-Tamanah sub-district in 2016 shows members of the Free Syrian Army utilizing an MRAP armored vehicle to push through a Syrian Arab Army position.

It's worth noting that the timestamp on the GoPro in this footage is way off. The first time I ever saw this footage was way back in 2016, and I distinctly remember having a conversation about how odd it was that the Free Syrian Army was posting footage of their victories from the future. A future where they apparently have MRAPs and are absolutely steam rolling the Syrian Arab Army at every single turn.

You see, here's the thing about both factions in the Syrian Civil War. At the time, both sides wanted to look like they were winning. What this meant for the Syrian Arab Army was they would drop artillery and barrel bombs all over the place at random, and the Syrian Ministry of Defense would release the sanitized footage to make it look like they were dominating their opposition. The Free Syrian Army on the other hand wasn't tied to any of the same sanitation procedures, so the footage that came from them always seemed more brutal, kind of like the footage in this video.

For them, there was no command and control in the release of footage from their perspective in combat. It was often recorded by individuals on the battlefield using cell-phones, GoPros, DJI drones, and handheld camera systems. Then, it would be released through dodgy channels that would get it onto the internet in anyway that they could, which is generally when we would find it, verify it, and then release it as a way to document the war in real-time.

That leads us into what you're seeing here. This was a particularly brutal assault that the FSA conducted in the al-Tamanah sub-district of Idlib in Northwestern Syria. The purpose of the attack was to push Syrian Arab Army troops out of the region in one swift movement so that the Free Syrian Army could better control the area. The results of that assault are obvious because of this video.

The Syrian Arab Army, comprised mostly of young conscripts, lost the will to fight mid-assault and tried to conduct an uncoordinated retreat. The result? Some of them got hit by an MRAP, a bunch of more of them ended up getting killed by machine gun fire.

Unfortunately, that's just how war works. The lesser organized side usually ends up on the losing side.