Observations from a recent SNA Third Legion training video
'Asifat al-Shamal's decade-old base on the Turkish border and the bulldozer excavation of Afrin's Tell Laq
On November 23rd, the SNA’s Third Legion published a video to their YouTube channel titled “A course raising the combat readiness of the fighters of the Third Legion in the ‘Martyr ‘Ammar Dadikhi’ camp in the northern Aleppo countryside.” The video is a two and a half minute training montage - quite pedestrian as far as SNA content goes. However, the locations the video was filmed at are (subjectively) rather interesting.
‘Ammar Dadikhi was the founder of Liwa’ Asifat al-Shamal, an A’zaz-based rebel group formed in 2011 that still exists to some capacity within al-Jabhah al-Shamiyah/the Third Legion. Dadikhi was died in January 2013 of injuries sustained during the siege of Menagh airbase (now under the control of the regime and SDF). For more on Liwa’ Asifat al-Shamal and its role in A’zaz over the years check out this 2015 Aymenn al-Tamimi piece, based on contemporaneous field research in the area.
The first half of the video is filmed at the camp named for Dadikhi, located on the Syrian-Turkish border just west of the Bab al-Salamah border crossing. It turns out this location (36.641187, 37.067695) has been used as a base by Liwa’ Asifat al-Shamal for over a decade now. It is the same location seen in 2013 footage recently dug up and geolocated by Twitter used @SCW_Nuggie.
The earliest imagery on Google Earth in which the base is from September 2012:
Not a whole lot had changed by February 2020 other than the border wall built by Turkey (this segment was erected in 2017):
The camp has undergone significant renovations in the past two years: pavement, new buildings, a wall…
The second half of the video shows Third Legion fighters carrying out combat exercises just east of Lake Meydankey in Afrin. The footage appears to have been filmed in relatively warm weather, meaning likely prior to October when the Third Legion was largely ejected from Afrin by HTS and its SNA allies.
The trainings grounds seen are located in close proximity to a site named Tell Laq (36.683961, 36.972030). Tell Laq is … a tell, an archaeological term (also the Arabic for ‘hill’) referring to an artificial mound created by the build up of debris created over time by human settlement. Like dozens of similar sites in Afrin, Tell Laq has been crudely excavated by bulldozer in search of antiquities in the years following Turkey and the SNA’s invasion of the region. The site can been seen in multiple shots of the video, clearly showing bulldozer tracks.
While hard evidence pinning these systematic excavations of Afrin archaeological sites on SNA factions has yet to be uncovered, the location of this Third Legion training ground at the foot of Tell Laq is yet another piece of circumstantial evidence tying SNA groups to these activities.