A little quick hit from this morning’s news: US anti-terrorism officials want to know how ISIS managed to get its hands on so many Toyota pickup trucks, and they’ve asked the automaker to help them figure it out.
Toyota Hilux pickups, an overseas model similar to the Toyota Tacoma, and Toyota Land Cruisers have become fixtures in videos of the ISIS campaign in Iraq, Syria and Libya, with their truck beds loaded with heavy weapons and cabs jammed with terrorists. The Iraqi Ambassador to the United States, Lukman Faily, told ABC News that in addition to re-purposing older trucks, his government believes ISIS has acquired “hundreds” of “brand new” Toyotas in recent years.
“This is a question we’ve been asking our neighbors,” Faily said. “How could these brand new trucks… these four wheel drives, hundreds of them — where are they coming from?”
Honestly, US officials seems a little late to game on this one. Analysts, reporters, bloggers, seemingly anyone who has bothered to look has long noticed just how common ISIS-branded Toyotas have become. Even Saturday Night Live is on top of the news. In fact the tough little pickups are so ubiquitous in ISIS photos and videos that one online wit has suggested leveraging its popularity for an ad campaign, which might look something like this:
The Islamic State’s preference for Toyota products really shouldn’t surprise anyone. They have been the vehicle of choice for rebel groups worldwide for decades now. Check out some pictures below. They were so prominent on the battlefield that the last phase of the Chad-Libya conflict of the 1980s is commonly referred to as the Toyota War.
From Latin America to Africa to the Middle East, these little trucks have been in nearly every conceivable warzone loaded with every manner of weaponry. Someone even welded a tank turret to one in the recent Libyan civil war.
Rebel groups love these things because they are virtually indestructible. The BBC show Top Gear tried mightily to kill one and failed spectacularly. (You can watch the video here.) You can find Toyota war wagons featured on Pinterest boards and in Reddit threads.
In the Afghan war, the trucks became so coveted that enterprising entrepreneurs flooded the market with counterfeits. Security analyst and former US Army Ranger Andrew Exum summarized the appeal for Newsweek back in 2010:
The Toyota Hilux is everywhere. It’s the vehicular equivalent of the AK-47. It’s ubiquitous to insurgent warfare. And actually, recently, also counterinsurgent warfare. It kicks the hell out of the Humvee.
While questions about ISIS use of Toyota trucks have circulated for years, Toyota executives say that they have procedures in place to ensure that their vehicles are not “diverted to unauthorized military use.” In a statement to ABC News, Toyota said it was not aware of any dealership selling to the terror group but “would immediately” take action if it did, including termination of the distribution agreement.
**Can’t you just imagine ISIS buyers strolling into their local dealership for Toyotathon’s rock-bottom prices and the best trade-in values in town? Yeah. Me neither. **
While Toyota may not know how all those trucks ended up stuffed with ISIS fighters, an Australian newspaper may have figured it out. The Daily Telegraph back in August reported that more than 800 Toyota Hilux pickups have gone missing in Sydney between 2014 and 2015, with terrorism experts there speculating that they were exported to ISIS-controlled territory in Iraq. Meanwhile, with the Iraqi-Syria border out of their control, there’s little Iraqi security forces can do to stop it.
