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This Is the Armed Robot the Iraqi Army Will Use to Fight ISIS

While western countries are being very careful about deploying armed robots on the ground - especially of the autonomous kind -, it looks like the Iraqi have no problem doing it in their fight against ISIS.
Alrobot in action 1 photo
Photo: Screenshot from YouTube
Reports from Russian website Sputnik quoted by Defense One claim that armed land drones have already been used in Syria to help the Syrian Arab Army fight off the rebels with impressive success. The Russian-made combat robots are said to have taken out 70 enemy infantry without any casualties on the Syrian side. This would only come to confirm what everybody's been saying for a while: that Russia is using the conflict in Syria as a field test for its latest weapon systems.

However, a new type of robot looks ready to be thrown into the fight, and this one is made in Iraq. The details aren't abundant as the main source is a short video on YouTube published by Baghdad Post together with a brief accompanying story. It says that the small vehicle called Alrobot - which is Arabic for "robot" - is the creation of "two brothers" and will soon be deployed into battle, even though no clear timeframe is given.

The Alrobot is equipped with an automatic machine gun of unspecified caliber and two rocket launchers for the Russian-made Katyusha models. It is controlled from afar by an operator via a radio link with the maximum range of one kilometer. That's hardly safe distance by today's standards, but it's still better than being on the front line, we guess.

While nothing about the Alrobot seems to be top secret - there's an air of amateurishness hovering above it - there's no info on its armor thickness or other defensive capabilities. Still, it's plain to see it's got a rather small silhouette as far as vehicles go, and since it's equipped with four cameras, it could also serve as a reconnaissance vehicle inside dangerous, hostile territories.

Since imagining a world without wars seems so unlikely right now, vehicles similar to the Alrobot will be all over the battlefields soon, with soldiers turned into little more than players of video games. Well, as long as less human lives are lost, there's no point in complaining.

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About the author: Vlad Mitrache
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"Boy meets car, boy loves car, boy gets journalism degree and starts job writing and editing at a car magazine" - 5/5. (Vlad Mitrache if he was a movie)
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