Jesus, how baroque. Just set up some EFPs in the kill zone already. When the car(s) are disabled, advance with one element, cut the HVT out of the subject vehicle—with more explosives if need be—and execute him.
“Remote controlled machine gun”, LOL. OTOH, I can see the utility of a belt-fed or two to suppress the lead or chase car if they’re still in the fight. Maybe that’s what was heard?
Done enough times to the U.S. in SW Asia…
EDIT: Thinking about LSLGuy’s point, and me never having been a guy who trained to do this sort of thing, one advantage of not enfilading the entire road with supporting fires, is that it allows greater separation between the advancing element and the fires coming from the support element. Agreed that the killers didn’t seem to care much who might have been downrange of their supporting fires.
Assuming he was assassinated by someone other than Iran’s own government, who do you propose has the capacity to set up high explosives all along an Iranian roadway and to deploy that many armed operatives in Iranian territory? And once you’ve blown up half the roadway and taken out your target, what do you do when the Iranian army shows up? Fight your way out like the legendary Greek phalanx that was supposed to have been abandoned in Persia and fought its way out alone?
How did AQI do it? It doesn’t take that many guys. A few to emplace some EFP pots, camo them, and run the wires to wherever. A few more to advance upon the HVT vehicle. Might even be the same guys triggering the EFPs. 4 more to have two gun teams in support, if they even needed that many. And 2-4 guys with exfiltration vehicles and security for same. A dozen dudes, tops. Probably fewer.
Lots more on the logistics and surveillance end, plus evidently the power got cut in the area. But it didn’t take an Army to do this, nor to exfil afterwards. For those of you who were there, in Afghanistan/Iraq, how hard was it to track down an EFP-initiated ambush on a small group, and how many guys typically would be involved?
A fine plan in relatively friendly or totally uninhabited territory. Doing the same thing on the outskirts of an “enemy held” town is rather a taller order assuming you want to recover your own strike team in one piece.
With modern tech it’d be easy enough to rig some cameras with a decent field of view and have nobody involved be within 100 miles of event when it goes down. Followed as the articles have said by all the attack equipment near the site self-destructing on another remote command.
Those guys then pitch their equipment into a nearby dumpster and make their way to the border. Heck, the triggerman and all that incriminating gear may have been in the home country and nobody involved in the physical setup has any after-the-fact detectable connection to it.
For their sake they’ve got to hope there’s no surveillance video showing who drove that car into position.
ETA: ref your second post, AQI did it by happily blending back into the sympathizers who represented most of the local populace. Ditto Taliban in their areas. Mossad / CIA / ??? employees 30 miles outside Tehran? Not so much.
Iran has supposedly had a hard time getting its Baluchi minority to shape up and fly right, and—allegedly—the Mossad/Sayeret Whoever has taken advantage of that for operations within Iran in the past. The equipment required for what I played out, is fairly minor, and likely able to be obtained within the target country. A few belt-feds and small-arms—Iranian army issue—a few purchased/stolen vehicles, some minor electronics and demo equipment. New cell phones texting on WhatsApp or Signal for comms. Assuming the HVT doesn’t roll with a cell jammer or other ECM. Though chase, lead vehicles and a bulletproof vehicle seem like a big deal. Everyone wears masks—COVID, LOL. (The Israelis have had problems with ubiquitous cameras and hotel surveillance systems in the past, admittedly.)
Let’s do your remote control thing. You’ve got to have transmitting elements, set up, calibrated, aimed, in the hinterlands. All transmitting, so they need power. The remote control MG, how does it operate in full cyclic? What’s the beaten area at the target range? Can you adjust it remotely, and how? Will the projectiles defeat the HVT’s vehicle armor? If the vehicle’s any good at all, it won’t—even with ×54 AP, whatever 7n version that is—until you’re using 12.7 and up. Which is more difficult to source, bolt to your truck bed, etc…
Granted it’s Rube Goldberg has hell. The only advantage I can see is it ensures your team is nowhere near the scene of the crime when it goes down.
As to transmitters, it’s all just cellphones. None of this is hard once you’re operating in areas with reliable cellphone signals so you can pass what looks like ordinary internet data back and forth.
Timedout: EDIT: how are you going to set all this up, and keep security on all of it, enough ahead of time so that you can be 100 miles away when you push, “Go?”
It just seems like a lot more exposure to me, versus identifying the desired routes and potential kill zones, then actually setting things up only a limited amount of time before the target takes that route back. Execute the hit, leave the trash, and zip to another town via vehicular transport. Go to ground there or do the rest of the exfiltration plan.
Imagine this in the U.S. How long would it take various LE to pull their thumbs out and even figure out what happened? Half hour? More? You could be 30 miles away in that much time. In other vehicles besides the ones you used to leave the kill zone.
Fair point - but you’d think that the team in charge of protecting such a critically important person would have given him a bit of training on situational awareness and what to (not) do in various circumstances, e.g. don’t get out of your bulletproof car if you think someone might be shooting at you.
Something like that, why is he even driving his own car? He’s got other things to do than drive.
Further, I thought it was executive protection driving 101 to get the hell out of the ambush? If you’re taking fire, get out of Dodge. Let the chase car deal with it, if you want to. It includes running stuff over: chickens, road debris, small children. Let the chase car deal with it. Drive the truck somewhere else.
Yes, let’s stop, and let our dignitary exit the armored vehicle to screw around outside while we might be taking fire. Great idea.
My guess is the vehicle was disabled, and either he thought he could get to a different running vehicle to escape, or he thought the killers’ supporting fires were defeating the armor on his vehicle and he needed to dismount. Or he really was too dumb to live, who can say?
Again, I don’t do this, and I’ve never done this. This is me guessing. Perhaps people who have trained on this sort of thing, can point out something incredibly obvious to explain the stated behavior and events.
Iraq and Afghanistan were war zones, with insurgent activity and local support. People don’t do what you described in places where the rule of law is still functional.
It happens in Mexico. It happens in Niger. It happens all over the world. Heck, it happens here, especially if we throw things like the ‘apprehension’ of Bonnie and Clyde into it. EFPs are novel, but not especially difficult to make and use with practice. RPGs are likely easier to obtain, and would disable an light armored vehicle about as effectively.
Why should Iran be immune? Granted, it takes more groundwork and prep to do an ambush like this versus just parking a giant VBIED next to the road, and punting an armored Mercedes for distance, but that’s part of sending a message too. “We can reach you anywhere, and there’s a bunch of people in your country who really don’t like what you’re doing.”
You could do the exact same thing in this country, with a sufficiently motivated and funded opposition. They might not all get away to do it—again, depending where in the US they tried it. Lots of people with cell phones, lots of cops—and they’d certainly get all kinds of unwelcome attention, and the initial preparation would hopefully trip them up, but you could do this with less than a dozen people. Certainly fewer than the 61 or so mentioned in that, (IIRC) Guardian write-up of the hit.
Could we have a little help with the acronyms, here? I know that “RPG” is “rocket propelled grenade”, and I’m guessing “HVT” is “high-value target”, but I’m lost on “EFP”. And “VBIED” is… “vehicle-based improvised explosive device”?
Also, am I the only person who, on hearing about a prominent official in an authoritarian country being assassinated, my first thought is an inside job? Either to encourage the others, or as a false-flag causus belli.
Is it? I thought it was just a Russian acronym for handheld anti-tank grenade-launcher. I suppose any of the RPG-29, RPG-30, etc. family would disable an armored Mercedes pretty well?
Bear in mind that plenty of Israelis look exactly like Iranians (including actual Persian Jews). Teach them some basic Farsi and an army hit squad could just stroll away and get lost in the urban crowd - with Covid masks and Burqas making it even easier. The Iranians will look for them, of course, but it’ll take them a day or two to track them down and by then they’ll be long gone.
Iran is a modern, urbanized nation, and it’s much easier to hide in those than in tribal and rural areas, where everyone knows everyone else.
Sorry. EFP’s been covered. It’s main advantage is stand-off capability vs a Munroe-effect shaped charge warhead, like in the first Rocket-Propelled Grenades. I.e., you can detonate the EFP warhead yards away from what you’re trying to penetrate, and the blob of ‘self-forged’ metal will still penetrate a good deal through armor. Munroe-effect shaped charges form a plasma jet that moves a great deal quicker, but must be in contact with the armor. Which is why you see slats and screens and stand off armor plates on armored vehicles: to detonate the shaped charge early and prematurely dissipate the plasma jet.
HVT: High-Value Target. The thing you’re trying to protect or to kill, depending on your point of view.
VBIED is as you said it. A big—since a truck is carrying it—improvised bomb. Add an S to the front if there’s a driver driving it, trying to send the target and himself to Paradise. I said VBIED versus just bombing the culvert under the road (like how the prosecutor of the Mafia, Giovanni Falcone was killed) because that takes time to emplace that much ordnance, and no one watching. VBIED? Just drive the truck nearby and run.
Yeah, it could be internal. But this is pretty embarrassing to admit for the Iranians. It took some setup time and organization to pull this off. Not something they’d like to admit, I’d think, that the Jews can snuff any VIP that annoys them, armored convoy or not.
Paraphrasing what Little Nemo wrote about the death of FDR and JFK a long time ago here, if you really had insider access, and you wanted a guy gone, wouldn’t you set it up to look like a cerebral hemorrhage, and not like some psycho penetrated all your plans and security, and still was able to kill you?
Yeah, nearly all the Iranians in Beverly Hills are Jewish. Interestingly, of all my Iranian acquaintances only one was actually Persian – and she was Baha’i, not Moslem.