A Look at an Al Nusra Terrorist Training Camp

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O05EOkapXHY]

Obviously, this has been put together for propaganda purposes, but some information can be gleaned from it.  While they seem to be concentrating on maneuvers (though their dispersion is still pretty bad), marksmanship doesn’t seem to have made any headway on the list of priorities since the Iraq insurgency.

The above video is from the Abu Ghadiyah training camp in Syria.  Abu Ghadiyah was a leader of the AQI facilitation network in Iraq who was killed in a cross-border US SOF raid in 2008.  Another major Al Nusra camp is the Ayman al Zawahiri training camp in Deir al Zour.

There are a lot of similarities between the videos Al Nusra has released of its training camps, and the videos from the AQ training camps in Afghanistan in the ’90s.  In fact, the uniforms appear almost identical, and many of the exercises are the same.