Czech Company Sells Tanks to Iraq to fight ISIS

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Source: http://domaci.ihned.cz/c1-63494580-tanky-ze-sternberka-pojedou-do-iraku-bojovat-s-islamskym-statem

Hello everyone,

Czech company Excalibur Army (an arms dealer) won a contract to supply the Iraqi army with more than a hundred of former Czech tanks (likely of the T-72M1 type) and other armored vehicles (BMP-1 variants) to help them fight the muslim radicals from the Islamic State. Dozens of these refitted vehicles are ready in the army depot in Šternberk today and the Iraqi representatives are inspecting them. According to the news server, they are very satisfied.

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Jaroslav Strnad, the owner of Excalibur, commented that this is only one part of a larger deal, involving more than a hundred of former Czech army vehicles, mothballed in the depots. The Iraqi representatives looked for a suitable supplier all around the Europe, but also in Ukraine and Russia. In the end, the chose the Czech company due to the good ratio of price versus state of the vehicles. Another advantage is that the Iraqi soldiers are already experienced with the former Soviet vehicles. According to Strnad, this contract is worth of dozens of millions of USD, the first one of its kind for the company, as previously, the Russians and the Ukrainians always won these contracts by using dumping prices.

This contract was approved by the Czech government and army officials as well as much better alternative of helping fight the terrorists than sending our own troops to Iraq, although our representatives are not united in this opinion, as for example Czech president Miloš Zeman recently urged the NATO states to start a full-blown land campaign against ISIS.

43 thoughts on “Czech Company Sells Tanks to Iraq to fight ISIS”

  2. That’s fine with me…it will be nice seeing all that vintage Soviet hardware getting to do some good work against those ISIS psychos. Too bad the US didn’t help resupply the Iraqi military after we wiped it out though…I’m sure that we could have come up with quite the supply of Pattons & M60s to resupply their forces.

    • The new Iraqi Army is equipped with M1 Abrams (export model); Hummvee’s and a loads of US gear. It’s just sheer incompetence and corruption that makes them fail against ISIS.

      • I guess M1s are too complicated and high-tech for them. Russians were always famous for making simple “people’s” tanks. :)

            • Gas turbines are crap in desert environments. They break down quickly and require much maintenance time. Canada, for example, sent their M1′s home and leased german Leopard 2 MBTs.

      • Thanks for your completely overblown remarks. M1 Abrams current numbers in Iraq is 140 + 170 on the way. Thats NOT a mighty force. “Loads” of US gear is nothing when your army doesn’t have efficient air support. When US soldiers were attacking any part in Iraq, the primary source of destruction was the airstrikes. Establishing a competent Iraqi air force is complicated for lots of geopolitical reasons.

        Though you are right about corruption and army’s north divisions mismanagement.

        • And 20 years from now we’ll be fighting whoever is in charge and they are driving those very same T72M tanks.

          Same with the Kurds.
          10 years from now we’ll have beaten IS but we’ll be fighting the Kurds instead because they want to have their own state.

          And the beat goes on…

          • I think the Kurds kinda deserve their own state tbh, they fight a lot harder than the rest of Iraq against ISIS and if it weren’t for them the the entire north would have fallen long ago.

            • That might be true but they have always been a terrorist group.
              Bombing,killing, murdering no less than 6 years ago.

              But now they are killing the right people and suddenly they are heroes.
              We provide them with weapons and training.

              We are creating the enemies of our future.
              We did that in the past and we keep doing it over and over and over.

              It’s insane !

              • I think you may be confusing the Turkish Kurds with the Iraqi Kurds. The Kurds in Iraq have been victims if anything, Saddam for instance gas-bombed Kurdish villages to test the effectiveness of Iraqi chemical weaponry.

      • Did you ever see how arabs fight using tanks wathcing on enemy witth tanks backside (stern, maybe)? RPG doesn`t see any differense between both american or russian tanks backside.

    • Ukraine is too volatile and untransparent to just send in military hardware beyond small arms. It would require a foreign intervention with soldiers on the ground, but nobody wants that … for now. Even Putin fights a war of denial.

      In Iraq the enemy is clear and its also conveniently far away.

  4. “Excalibur”- sword from the Arthurian legend, Czech company with some kind of UK link?

    Also didn’t Excalibur just sell sixteen T-72M to Nigeria?

    Now a large sales order to Iraq.

    Maybe if they are a listed company on a stock exchange, time to buy a few shares, as their next dividend might be juicy.

  5. “………..the Russians and the Ukrainians always won these contracts by using dumping prices.”

    Not necessarily a good thing. It is obvious why the Ukrainians are not selling despite the state of their economy but are the Russians hanging on to all their out of date equipment because they think they will need them?????

  6. Thank You for clarification. however I am not convinced about the efficiency of air strike campaign. Especially against the guerilla hrpup

    • When you’re down to guerilla warfare and your logistic lines are being blown from above, you can’t run a country. The air campaign has bascailly done that: turned ISIS, which at some point had most of the de-facto attributes of a state, into just yet another (big) bunch of bad guys. No more territory gains for ISIS, as whenever they start moving en masse they get bombed.

  8. Huh, I thought the T-72M1 was the main tank of the Iraqi Army for a while (other variants of the same tank were already in use under Saddam Hussein’s regime afaik), guess I was wrong.

    Regardless, it seems the Czechs are making some nice money, isn’t Excalibur the same dealer who sold T-72s to Nigeria?

  12. I take it these are much better than the “Lion of Babylon” version of the T-72 that the Iraq army already uses.

  13. that’s why world has “islamic terrorist armies”. someone should buy the old tanks and arms right?

    please watch “lord of war” movie if you still did not.

  14. I think what you meant to say was, “Czech company sells tanks to ISIL using the Iraqi Army as an intermediary”. The reason nobody wants to sell tanks to Iraq is because then we just end up having to bomb them later when the overwhelmingly corrupt army bugs out leaving all their armor, arty, and various and sundry other items for ISIL to walk in and resupply themselves with. They just can’t get past the whole Shia/Sunni thing to actually put together a cohesive force.

  15. T-72M1… Wait, if I remember correctly, this is the variant the Soviets’ tried to sell a couple decades ago, when they allowed the T-72 sold to the “friendly” countries. They didn’t fare well, as far as I remember.

    My guess is that the history is re-occuring. Well, whatever, less Iraqi population means less insurgency…

  16. If recent history is any indication, the title should read: “Czech Company Provides Tanks to IS via Iraqi Army”.

  17. Selling this to Iraq? Great, you might as well have just donated them to ISIS considering how the Iraqi military’s done so far.

    You know I wonder if after this is over we’ll be making the same kind of “we surrender” jokes about Iraq as we do about France (I do that already)…