Will the American Abrams super tank 'shine brightly' in Raqqa/Syria?

While it has been heavily involved in the Iraq battlefield, next May, the US super tank M1A2 Abram will have the opportunity to show itself in Syria.

Accordingly, heavy transport convoys with KRG license plates (of the semi-autonomous Kurdish government in Iraq), carrying many armored vehicles, all-terrain combat vehicles, weapons and ammunition crossed the Syrian border at the Semalka border gate (also known as Faysh Khabur, in al-Hasakah province).

In addition, the convoy also carried a number of heavy machine guns and light artillery batteries for the Syrian Democratic Forces.

At that time, military experts wondered if the US weapons shipments that had arrived in Raqqa to equip the SDF forces preparing for the campaign to retake the city were missing an extremely important piece of equipment, without which the Kurds could fail in Raqqa.

That is, the Americans did not provide the Kurdish fighters with a tank force to spearhead the attack. In Mosul, the Kurds could count on the Iraqi Army's tank force, but where would they look in Raqqa?

The importance of tanks is assessed by comparing the military challenges posed by the attacks in Mosul and Raqqa. Compared to the number of tanks provided to the Iraqi Kurds (Peshmerga), the number of armored vehicles provided by the US to the Syrian Kurdish units is too small.

Can the M1A1 Abrams prove itself in Raqqa/Syria?

Without a strong enough tank force, the campaign to liberate Raqqa could fail or take much longer than expected, no matter how much US air support is not enough to win an urban war.

It is now clear that US tanks have been delivered to Syria for the Kurds. However, the source did not disclose which version of the tanks the US provided to the Kurds.

Experts say that it is likely that the US will provide the Kurds with the same M1A1 version as Iraq, with more limited features than the M1A2 version currently used by the US Army, and this is unlikely to give the Kurds a big advantage over IS.

In recent times, the American M1A2 Abrams tank has been a great disappointment to the Iraqi army. Hundreds of super tanks that the US self-proclaimed as the world's number one have been burned down on battlefields around the world by the outdated anti-tank missiles of the Soviet Union/Russia.

In particular, the Iraqi tank force was almost “extinct” in the fight against IS. Of the 136 M1A1M Abrams that Washington provided to the 9th Division of the Iraqi Army as aid to buy early American tanks, by 2016, more than 100 had been burned.

Meanwhile, the terrorist organization Islamic State IS has quite a number of powerful anti-tank missiles, so the US tanks and armored vehicles will only have a chance to "burn brightly" and where will the Kurds rely on to advance into the streets of Raqqa?

The Syrian battlefield will be the most accurate test, clearly determining whether the quality of the US tank fleet considered to be the world's number 1 is good, whether the terrible losses in Iraq are "accidents" or whether they are really just "brightly burning torches".

According to Baodatviet