Why The SAS Replaced Every British Vehicle With A ‘Tourist’ Toyota To Beat ISIS In Syria –  Hw

June 2016, Al Tanf Garrison, Southeast Syria. A dusty triangle of desert where the borders of Syria, Iraq, and Jordan meet. A BBC camera lens catches something it was never meant to see. 12 men in beige chemmers, sunglasses, beards down to their chests, heavy machine guns mounted on tubular steel frames, anti-tank missiles in the back, and underneath all that equipment, the unmistakable silhouette of a Toyota Land Cruiser pickup truck.

For decades, the Special Air Service had gone to war in Land Rovers, Pink Panthers in Oman, stripped-down Defender 110s in Iraq. The Land Rover wasn’t just a vehicle, it was part of the regiment’s identity. And by 2016, the SAS had quietly walked away from it. They were fighting the Islamic State in the same Toyota that the Islamic State was driving, the same Toyota that aid workers drove, the same Toyota that Syrian civilians drove, and they had done it on purpose.

This is the story of how British engineers took the most ordinary truck in the Middle East, bolted a steel skeleton onto its back, and handed the Special Air Service a weapon that ISIS could not see coming until it was already inside their compound. To understand why the regiment abandoned the Land Rover, you have to understand what the war in Syria actually looked like.

By 2014, the Islamic State controlled territory the size of Britain. They moved in convoys of white Toyota Hilux pickups, often brand new, often still wearing dealer plates. According to ABC News reporting from October 2015, Toyota sold 18,000 Hiluxes and Land Cruisers in Iraq in 2013 alone, up from 6,000 just 2 years earlier. Iraqi Ambassador Lukman Faily told ABC News that ISIS had acquired hundreds of brand new Toyotas, and nobody could fully explain how.

Mark Wallace, chief executive of the Counter Extremism Project and a former United States Ambassador to the UN, put it plainly. He told ABC News that the Toyota Land Cruiser and Hilux had effectively become almost part of the ISIS brand. So, picture the problem facing British special forces planners. You need to insert a four-man patrol deep into contested territory.

You need them to move through villages where every third vehicle is a Toyota. You need them to look like nothing in particular. And you arrive in a Supercat Jackal, a 6 and 1/2 ton open-topped British military vehicle that looks like nothing else on Earth. The Land Rover wasn’t the answer, either. The classic SAS Land Rover, the Pink Panther of Oman fame, and its desert patrol vehicle successor, was retired from regiment service after the Al-Qaim raid on March 17, 2003.

The Supercat HMT 400 took over the heavy patrol role. But the HMT 400 has the same visibility problem as the Jackal. It is unmistakably Western military hardware. In a theater where being recognized as Western military was the single fastest way to compromise an operation, the regiment needed something else. They needed a vehicle that disappeared.

The answer was already in production, and it had been built not in Britain, but in Jordan. In 2003, Jankel Armoring Limited of Weybridge, Surrey, signed a joint venture with the King Abdullah II Design and Development Bureau in Amman. The new company was called Jordan Light Vehicle Manufacturing.

Their first product entered production in June 2005. The Jordanians called it Al Thalab, the Arabic word for the fox. The concept was straightforward to the point of being radical. Take a Toyota Land Cruiser 79 Series cab chassis pickup, the workhorse diesel utility truck sold across Africa and the Middle East, strip the cargo bed, bolt on a tubular steel space frame designed to flex with the chassis over broken ground, add two weapon stations, one swing arm mount at the commander’s position for a general purpose machine gun, one geared traversing ring at the

rear for a .50 caliber heavy machine gun, a Mark 19 grenade launcher, or a 40 mm automatic grenade launcher, add two antenna mounts, add power take-offs for radios, add a roll cage, add optional stretcher fittings for casualty evacuation, leave everything else alone. The engine in the operational specification is the Toyota 4.

5 L 1VDFTVV8 turbo diesel. 151 kW of power at 3,400 revolutions per minute, 430 Nm of torque from 1,200 revolutions, five-speed manual gearbox, part-time four-wheel drive with a low-range transfer case, solid front and rear axles, coil springs at the front, leaf springs at the rear, a 130 L factory fuel tank, crew of four with space for two stretcher cases.

Now, before we get into how the regiment actually used this thing in Syria, if you’ve made it this far into the deep dive, hit subscribe. It costs nothing, and it tells the algorithm that detailed British military engineering content has an audience. Now, back to Al-Tanf. The specifications that matter for a special forces patrol vehicle are not horsepower and top speed, they are range, payload, and the boring stuff.

Reliability, parts availability, whether you can fix it in the desert with a spanner. Jankel’s published figures put the unrefueled range of the Al-Thalab long-range patrol vehicle between 1,200 and 1,500 km, depending on configuration and load. Payload sits at around 1,550 kg in the baseline build. The vehicle is rated to operate between -15° C and +55° C.

It is fully air It is fully air transportable in a Hercules C-130 or an A400M, and it fits inside a Chinook helicopter with the roll bars folded and the weapons removed. It is designed for self-sustained 10-day patrols. These numbers matter, but they are not why the regiment chose this vehicle. The regiment chose it because of what the platform underneath is.

The Toyota Land Cruiser 79 series is the most boring truck in the world. It uses a body on frame chassis, solid axles front and rear, a diesel engine with mechanical fuel injection in most international markets, no common rail electronics, no drive by wire, no computer that needs a dealer laptop to diagnose. A broken half shaft can be replaced in a workshop in Erbil.

A failed alternator can be sourced in Amman. A radiator can be welded by a mechanic in Hassaka who’s been welding the same radiators for 30 years. In 2016, the official Toyota dealership network in the Middle East was selling more 79 series cab chassis trucks per year than the British Army had ever bought Land Rovers. Spare parts were everywhere and critically, every spare part for the truck underneath looked like a spare part for a civilian truck.

You could resupply your patrol vehicle without anyone ever knowing it was a patrol vehicle. This is the part the headlines miss. The Althelab is not a Toyota with guns bolted on. It is a Toyota that has been engineered by a British defense contractor to remain mechanically identical to every other Toyota in the region.

The Jankel space frame attaches at the chassis interface points. The original Toyota suspension is retained. The original Toyota cooling system is retained. The original Toyota fuel system is retained. From 30 m away, you cannot tell it apart from the white Land Cruiser that just drove a UN water engineer to a refugee camp. That is the weapon.

The truck is the weapon. On August 8th, 2016, BBC Middle East correspondent Quentin Somerville published the photographs that everyone in Whitehall had spent two years pretending did not exist. The pictures had been taken in June. They showed British soldiers in tactical kit standing alongside their Althelabs at the new Syrian Army base at Al Tanf following an ISIS attack on the base.

In his audio report, Somerville described them as a small but lethal force of 12 men who had come laden with weaponry to fight their way out of any trouble. The BBC report noted the vehicles were carrying an arsenal of equipment including sniper rifles, heavy machine guns, and anti-tank missiles. The Guardian’s Ewen MacAskill, writing the same day, cited an independent source confirming the men were UK special forces.

The Ministry of Defense, as is standard practice for any question about United Kingdom special forces, declined to comment. Parliament had authorized British airstrikes inside Syria on December the 2nd, 2015. Parliament had not authorized British ground troops. The regiment was inside Syria anyway. They were operating under separate authorities that the Ministry of Defense never explains on the floor of the House of Commons.

What we know from documented sources is this. United Kingdom special forces rotated through Al Tanf to train Syrian opposition fighters, first the New Syrian Army, later the Revolutionary Commando Army, and after October 2022, the Syrian Free Army. They worked alongside American special operators, including Delta Force operators from 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment Delta.

They conducted what defense analysts assessed to have been a mix of training, liaison, intelligence work, and direct action. The specifics are classified, and unless a primary source confirms them, they remain classified. What we also know is that the Americans were watching the British Toyota approach with quiet professional jealousy.

On March 7th, 2018, defense reporter Joseph Trevithick published a piece in The War Zone revealing that United States Special Operations Command had issued a formal requirement for a vehicle whose body panels could be reconfigured to mimic a Toyota Hilux, a Ford Ranger, or a Toyota Land Cruiser 200.

The SOCOM specification stated that the result had to be essentially indistinguishable from its commercial counterparts to observers standing approximately 330 ft away while it was traveling at a nominal speed of 35 mph. A United States Air Force Journal piece published in 2023 quoted the complaint that had echoed through the ranks for years.

The piece was titled Toyotas and Terrorists. The line that mattered was a single question. Why are ISIS’s trucks better than ours? The British answer had been in production since 2005. The Altha Lab also exposed something uncomfortable about the alternatives. The American Ground Mobility Vehicle 1.1, built by General Dynamics on a Flyer 72 chassis under a $562.

2 million contract awarded on August 22nd, 2013, is a bespoke special operations platform. Crew capacity of nine, payload of around 2,585 kg, range of about 640 km. It is an excellent vehicle. It does not look like a Hilux. The Australian Special Operations Vehicle Surveillance Reconnaissance, the Nary, ordered in August 2008 at a cost of 80 million Australian dollars for 31 vehicles, is a Supercat HMT Extenda variant.

It does not look like a Hilux, either. The British, by going through Jankel and Jordan Light Vehicle Manufacturing, bought something the Americans were still writing requirements documents about in 2018. The price of that capability, however, was paid in full on March 29th, 2018. That day, in Manbij, northern Syria, an explosion killed Sergeant Matt Tonroe of the 3rd Battalion, the Parachute Regiment, attached to United Kingdom Special Forces.

He was 33. He died alongside American Master Sergeant Jonathan J. Dunbar of Delta Force. The Pentagon and the Combined Joint Task Force initially attributed the deaths to an ISIS emplaced improvised explosive device. In July 2019, the Ministry of Defense issued a revised statement. Forces News carried the verbatim text on July 28th, 2019.

Sergeant Matt Tonroe died from blast injuries caused by an explosion during a military operation. It was initially believed that Sergeant Tonroe was killed by enemy action. However, subsequent investigation concluded that Sergeant Tonroe was killed by the accidental detonation of explosives carried by coalition forces. The defense secretary at the time, Gavin Williamson, told his TV news on March 30, 2018 that Sergeant Monro fought to protect British values, British freedoms, and to keep us back at home safe.

The regiment lost a man. The Ministry of Defense eventually told the truth about why. That is the cost of the work that was being done out of vehicles that looked to the casual observer at the next checkpoint like another aid worker’s pickup. Jankel announced on July 10, 2023 that more than 500 Fox family vehicles had been delivered globally.

The official operator list published in the same Way Bridge press release names 15 nations. The United Kingdom is one of them. The United States is another. So, are France, Belgium, New Zealand, Romania, Italy, Spain, Oman, Jordan, Brunei, Indonesia, Mauritania, Botswana, and South Korea.

France’s special forces variant, the VPS 2, was unveiled at Eurosatory in 2018 and is built on the same Toyota 79 series chassis. Belgium’s order of 108 Fox rapid reaction vehicles, placed in January 2016, switched to the Toyota Hilux chassis. The vehicle the British originally co-designed for the Jordanian army in 2005 is now the quiet standard for European special operations.

Look at what the Land Rover Pink Panther represented in 1968. A vehicle painted to disappear into the Omani desert. A vehicle designed to extend the operational reach of small patrols into hostile territory. A vehicle whose entire purpose was to let 12 men do the work of 1200 by being where the enemy did not expect them.

The Al Thalab is the same idea 50 years later applied to a different desert and a different enemy. The paint scheme is no longer pink. The vehicle is no longer British built end to end. The engine is no longer a Rover straight-6, but the principle is unchanged. Get the small patrol into the place the enemy is not watching.

Give them the firepower to fight their way out if they are seen and above all do not look like what you are. The British regiment did not abandon the Land Rover because the Land Rover was bad. They abandoned the Land Rover and the Supercat and the Jackal for the Syria role because the war had changed and the rules of being seen had changed with it.

The enemy drove Toyotas, the civilians drove Toyotas, the aid workers drove Toyotas and so in the end did the regiment. A British defense company. A Jordanian factory, a Japanese chassis, a weapon system that lets 12 men disappear into a country of 40 million. That is what the BBC’s photographer captured at Al Tanf in June 2016. Not a Toyota with guns on it.

A piece of British engineering doctrine 80 years old hiding in plain sight. The Fox was always the point.

QQ4 Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The friendship began on a live television program in November of 1986 in the 11 seconds after Bob Dylan called Keith Richards music derivative on camera. Keith Richard’s response to that assessment, one sentence said without anger, without performance, with the specific directness of a man who has nothing to prove and knows it made Bob Dylan laugh.

Then made Bob Dylan go quiet. then made Bob Dylan say two words that people who know Bob Dylan say he almost never said to anyone. This is the story of those 11 seconds and the 40 years that followed them. The program was a live music interview special broadcast on an American network on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The format was simple.

Two musicians, a host, an hour of conversation about music and the state of it. The producers had assembled the pairing of Bob Dylan and Keith Richards with the specific calculation of television producers who understand that two people with equally strong and potentially incompatible views about what music is and what it should do will produce better television than two people who agree about everything.

The calculation was correct, though not in the way the producers had anticipated. Bob Dylan was 45 years old in November of 1986. Bob Dylan had released Empire Burlesque the previous year and had been on the road for most of the intervening period as part of the True Confessions tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

Bob Dylan was in November of 1986 in one of the most prolific and restless phases of a career that had consisted almost entirely of prolific and restless phases. A career that had moved through folk, rock, country, gospel, and back again, that had been declared finished at least six times by the music press, and at each time continued with the serene indifference of a river to the opinions of people standing on its banks.

Bob Dylan had been redefining what music could be. Since 1962, Bob Dylan had invented and reinvented himself so many times that reinvention had become his defining characteristic, not in the superficial sense of a performer changing costumes, but in the deeper sense of a musician who had never allowed his work to settle into a form that could be anticipated or categorized from the outside.

Bob Dylan understood influence and originality and the relationship between them better than almost anyone alive in 1986. Bob Dylan had spent 24 years thinking carefully and specifically about where music came from and where music was going and what it meant that those two things were always in constant conversation with each other.

Keith Richards was 42 years old in November of 1986. Keith Richards had been playing guitar professionally since 1962. Keith Richards had built a career on a foundation of American blues and rhythm and blues. A foundation that Keith Richards had studied with the systematic devotion of someone who understood that the tradition he was building on was not incidental to the music he was making, but essential to it.

that you could not understand what Keith Richards did without understanding where Keith Richards had come from and what Keith Richards had been listening to since he was a teenager in Dartford with American Import Records and a secondhand guitar and no teacher except the recordings themselves. Keith Richards had never pretended otherwise. Keith Richards had in fact spent considerable energy across his career making the lineage explicit, naming the artists, citing the recordings, insisting on the acknowledgement of influence that the mainstream music

industry had a long history of suppressing or ignoring or crediting to the wrong people. If anything, Keith Richards was more transparent about his sources than most musicians of his generation. Keith Richards had always said openly that the Rolling Stones came directly from the blues, that Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson and the specific tradition of the Mississippi Delta were not background influences, but foundational ones.

The music Keith Richards made was in direct and sustained conversation with that tradition, something Keith Richards considered not a limitation, but a responsibility and a form of respect. The interview had been running for 8 minutes when the host asked Bob Dylan about the current state of rock and roll.

Bob Dylan answered with the density and the indirection that characterized Bob Dylan’s responses to direct questions, turning the question over, approaching it from an unexpected angle, finding his way to what he actually thought through a series of observations that moved like a river rather than a road. Bob Dylan was not a straightforward interview subject.

Bob Dylan had been asked about rock and roll in hundreds of interviews across 24 years and had developed the habit of treating the question as an invitation to think out loud rather than a request for a prepared position. The producer Gerald Sherman said afterward that in the first 8 minutes of the interview, he had been slightly anxious, not because anything was going wrong, but because nothing was going anywhere in particular yet.

The interview had the feeling of two conversations happening simultaneously. Bob Dylan’s internal one and the external one visible to the cameras. And Gerald Sherman was not certain in those first eight minutes that the two conversations would converge into something. Bob Dylan talked about influence. Bob Dylan talked about originality.

Bob Dylan talked about the difference between music that absorbed a tradition and transformed it and music that absorbed a tradition and reproduced it. And then Bob Dylan made his assessment. And then Bob Dylan said with the precision of a man making a musical assessment rather than a personal judgment that the Rolling Stones work, and Bob Dylan was specific, naming Keith Richards as the guitarist whose approach he was discussing was derivative in a way that Bob Dylan found limiting.

Bob Dylan said it without hostility. Bob Dylan said it as a technical observation about the relationship between source material and the work that came from it. Bob Dylan said that Keith Richards played the blues the way the blues had already been played, rather than using the blues as a starting point for something that had not yet been played.

Keith Richards had been listening to this with the specific attention Keith Richards gave to things being said about music by people who knew music. Keith Richards did not interrupt. Keith Richards did not shift in his chair or display any of the visible signals of a person preparing a defensive response. Keith Richards listened to Bob Dylan’s complete observation all the way to its conclusion without interrupting and without displaying any visible signal of preparing a response.

Then Keith Richards said one sentence. The sentence was not a rebuttal. The sentence did not defend Keith Richards music or argue for its originality or challenge Bob Dylan’s characterization of what the blues meant in the context of rock and roll. The sentence was something else entirely, something that required a specific kind of confidence to say.

The confidence of a person who has spent long enough thinking about the same things as the person they are talking to that they can locate the exact point where their thinking diverges and say something useful about that point rather than simply defending their own position. The sentence acknowledged everything Bob Dylan had said, the assessment, the distinction Bob Dylan was drawing, the specific musical concern underlying the observation, and then turned it 90°.

Keith Richards took Bob Dylan’s own framework, the one Bob Dylan had used to analyze Keith Richards relationship to the blues tradition, and applied it back to Bob Dylan’s work with the same precision Bob Dylan had used to apply it to Keith Richards. Spare aimed. The sentence asked Bob Dylan something about Bob Dylan’s own music, about the relationship between Bob Dylan’s sources and Bob Dylan’s output that Bob Dylan had not been asked on television before.

The sentence did not attack. The sentence illuminated. Bob Dylan laughed. The laugh was not the polite laugh of someone responding to a joke. The laugh was the involuntary laugh of someone who has been genuinely surprised. The specific kind of surprise that a person of exceptional intelligence experiences when someone else’s intelligence exceeds their expectations.

Bob Dylan laughed for 4 seconds. Then Bob Dylan stopped laughing. Then Bob Dylan was quiet for 3 seconds in the way that Bob Dylan was quiet when Bob Dylan was thinking rather than performing thought. Then Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” The producer in the booth, a man named Gerald Sherman, who had been working in television for 14 years, said afterward that in 14 years of live television production, he had never heard Bob Dylan say those two words in a public forum.

Gerald Sherman said he had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions and had observed Bob Dylan in numerous other contexts and that you’re right was not a phrase that Bob Dylan deployed easily or often because Bob Dylan had spent 24 years being right about music in ways that other people eventually caught up with. And the experience of being right ahead of everyone else does not generally produce a man who says you’re right readily when someone else makes a point.

The host of the program, a journalist named Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said afterward that the 11 seconds between Bob Dylan’s assessment and Bob Dylan saying, “You’re right,” were the most extraordinary 11 seconds of television she had been present for. Patricia Wells said that what she witnessed in those 11 seconds was not a debate or a confrontation or a celebrity exchange of competing opinions.

Patricia Wells said what she witnessed was one musician recognizing another musician as an equal, which was in the specific context of Bob Dylan in 1986, not something that happened in public very often. The interview continued for another 42 minutes after those 11 seconds. The conversation between Bob Dylan and Keith Richards in the remaining 42 minutes was described by everyone who watched it as fundamentally different from the first 8 minutes.

The host, Patricia Wells, who had been conducting music interviews for 12 years and understood the difference between the performance of conversation and actual conversation, said that at approximately the 9-minute mark, something shifted in the studio. That the formal interview, architecture dissolved, and what replaced it was something less structured and more genuine.

Bob Dylan and Keith Richards talked about influence and originality and the blues and what it meant to build on a tradition without being consumed by it. They talked about specific recordings and specific musicians with the specificity of two people who had spent their entire adult lives thinking about these things and rarely found another person who had thought about them with equivalent care.

They talked about where music came from and where music was going and whether those two questions were actually one question or two. Patricia Wells said afterward that she had asked approximately four questions in the remaining 42 minutes because Bob Dylan and Keith Richards did not require questions. They required only a room and a camera and the shared understanding that what they were saying together was worth recording carefully.

She said it was the best interview she had ever conducted and that she had conducted the smallest part of it. After the program, Bob Dylan and Keith Richards were in the corridor outside the studio when the host Patricia Wells passed them. Patricia Wells said she did not stop because she did not want to interrupt.

She observed them for approximately 30 seconds from a distance. She said they were talking with the ease of people who had known each other for years rather than people who had met for the first time 2 hours earlier. She said that something had shifted between them during the broadcast that the broadcast had made permanent rather than temporary.

She continued down the corridor and did not look back. She said in her account of that evening that she had decided in that moment not to interrupt the conversation because some conversations are more valuable than any question a journalist might ask and that the conversation she had observed for 30 seconds in the corridor outside the studio was one of them.

She had been a music journalist for 12 years. She recognized the difference. Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have maintained their friendship across four decades. They have appeared together at various events, most significantly at the concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, where people who were present described them as inseparable for most of the evening, occupying the same corner of the backstage area and talking with the concentrated attention of people who only have a limited amount of time together and intend to use it

well. Bob Dylan has spoken about Keith Richards in interviews with the specific thoughtful care that Bob Dylan reserves for musicians whose work Bob Dylan considers genuinely important rather than merely culturally prominent. Keith Richards has spoken about Bob Dylan in similar terms with the specific respect of someone who recognizes in another person a commitment to music that goes deeper than career.

Neither Bob Dylan nor Keith Richards has made a public statement specifically about how the friendship began or about the November 1986 interview. Bob Dylan has not mentioned the 11 seconds. Keith Richards has not mentioned the sentence. The interview exists in the archive. The 11 seconds are there. The laugh is there. The two words are there.

What is also there for anyone who watches the interview from its beginning and pays attention to the shift that happens at the 9-minute mark is the specific moment when two people who thought they were appearing on a television program discovered they were actually talking to each other. What Keith Richards said in that one sentence has never been officially reported.

The people who were in the studio that evening, Gerald Sherman, Patricia Wells, the floor crew, the two camera operators, the makeup artist who was watching from the side of the set, have described the sentence in consistent terms. They have described its effect. They have described Bob Dylan’s laugh and Bob Dylan’s silence and Bob Dylan’s two words.

They have not repeated the sentence itself in the specific understanding that the sentence was said between two musicians on a television program and that its power resided in the specific context of that exchange and would not survive removal from it intact. What can be said is this. Keith Richards said something to Bob Dylan about Bob Dylan’s music that used Bob Dylan’s own observation about Keith Richards as its starting point and arrived somewhere that Bob Dylan had not anticipated.

Keith Richards turned Bob Dylan’s assessment 90° and showed Bob Dylan something about the music they had both spent their lives making that Bob Dylan recognized immediately as true. And Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” Two words said by Bob Dylan in public on live television in 1986 to Keith Richards in response to a single sentence Keith Richards had said about music.

Two words that Gerald Sherman, who had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions, said he had never heard Bob Dylan say in a public forum. Two words that Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said were the most significant two words she had heard in those 12 years. Not because of their content, but because of who said them and what it cost to say them and what it meant that Keith Richards had produced them in 11 seconds from a conversation that began with Bob Dylan calling Keith Richards’s music derivative. And Keith Richards and

Bob Dylan have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The sentence did its work in 11 seconds on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The work has been ongoing ever since. If this story moved you, subscribe and leave a comment below. Have you ever said something to someone that turned a potential disagreement into an unexpected and lasting connection? Tell us about it in the comments below.

Share this with someone who needs to be reminded that the right sentence said at the right moment can completely change the entire direction of a relationship. Ring the notification bell for more untold stories about the extraordinary human beings behind music’s greatest legends.