From a Western military perspective, using a T-34 against 21st-century drones and thermal optics seems suicidal. Yet, Kurdish forces in 2021 leveraged three specific advantages of the vintage vehicle.
While most of the world views the T-34 as a museum piece—a legendary "tank that won WWII"—various militias and regional forces, including groups in , have kept these 80-year-old machines operational as late as 2021. The Survival of a Legend t34 kurdish 2021
The 85mm D-5T gun, while slow to load, fires a 9.2kg high-explosive fragmentation round. In 2021, Kurdish engineers modified these rounds with proximity fuses or simply used them to demolish buildings used as sniper nests by Turkish-backed forces. Footage from March 2021 showed a T-34-85 destroying a heavy machine-gun nest in the Afrin countryside at a range of 1.2 kilometers. From a Western military perspective, using a T-34
For decades, these tanks sat in depots, rusting. They were long since rendered obsolete by T-55s, T-62s, and eventually T-72s. When the Iraqi Army collapsed in the face of the Islamic State (ISIS) onslaught in 2014, weapon depots were looted. The Kurdish Peshmerga (Iraq) and the YPG/YPJ (Syrian Kurdish forces) suddenly found themselves in control of a motley collection of old Soviet armor, including the venerable T-34. The Survival of a Legend The 85mm D-5T
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Images and videos of the burning tank circulated on social media. For many locals and observers, the destruction of the T-34 was symbolic. While the tank represented a Soviet military past, it had stood as a local landmark. Its burning was viewed by some as a tragic erasure of local history, while others saw it as collateral damage in a moment of intense political upheaval.
Originally a Soviet WWII icon, thousands were exported to the Middle East (Syria, Iraq, Egypt) during the 1950s and 60s. Kurdish Modification: