ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

Taliban spacial forces, illustrative image On November 29, the British security company G4S acknowledged that five of its employees were killed in  the recent attack by the Taliban on its headquarters  in the Afghan capital of Kabul. G4S said that thirty-two other employees were injured, five of them are still in a critical condition. “We are committed to our security role in support of the people of Afghanistan, and we are determined that incidents such as this will not prevent the vital work that the international community conducts from continuing,” G4S said in an official statement. British media identified one of the casualties as 33-year old Luke Griffin, a veteran infantryman of the British military who worked for G4S as a close protection specialist. According to the Sun, Luke saw action in Iraq and Afghanistan during his service in the army. Besides G4S employees many personnel of Afghan security forces and even civilians were killed and injured in the well-plann

On November 28, several fighters of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), who were recently captured by ISIS, were killed and injured in an airstrike by the US-led coalition on a prison of the terrorists group in the town of al-Khasmah in the middle Euphrates River Valley. On November 29, the ISIS-linked news agency, Amaq, released a video showing the aftermath of the US-led coalition airstrike on the prison in al-Khasmah. In the video, several injured captives can be seen confirming that they are fighters of the SDF. “The [US-led] coalition carried out the airstrike to get rid of us,” an injured SDF fighters said in Amaq’s video. ISIS captured dozens of SDF fighters and commanders during its  recent attacks  on the group’s positions in the Euphrates Valley. All the captives were Arabs, some of them had been forced to join the ranks of the SDF. The SDF was widely criticized by many Syrian activists for deploying mostly Arabs on the frontlines against ISIS. The issu

On November 29, the media wing of the Houthis released a video showing Houthi fighters destroying two military vehicles of the Saudi military in the Kingdom’s southern province of Jizan with Iranian Toophan anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs). This was the first time this Iranian weapon was seen in the Yemeni battlefield. According to experts, the Toophan is the Iranian copy of the US-made TOW ATGM system. Some variants of the Toophan ATGM have a range of more than 3.5km and can overcome reactive armour then penetrate 900mm of rolled homogeneous armour (RHA). Just like the TOW, the Toophan is guided by semi-automatic command to line of sight (SACLOS). While this is the first time the Toophan is documented in the hands of the Houthis, the Saudi-led coalition foiled an attempt by Iranian intelligence to smuggle missiles of this type to the Yemeni group three years ago. Click to see full-size image In the last few months, the Houthis destroyed dozens of vehicles of the Saudi-