Notice the trend with the revolution photojournalism? Toyota pickup trucks. There's a reason my beat-up Tacoma pickup has the nickname 'Taco Jihad' - key ingredient to uprisings.
These types of vehicles are now widely referred to as "technicals":
> Africa, says [David] Kilcullen, is where the truck got its
> nickname as a fighting vehicle, “the technical.” “When
> [nongovernmental organizations] and the U.N. first went into
> Somalia,” he says, referring to a period in the 1990s, “they
> were not able to bring their own guards. So they got so-called
> ‘technical assistance grants’ to hire guards and drivers on
> the ground. Over time, a ‘technical’ came to mean a vehicle
> owned by a guard company, and then eventually to mean a Hilux
> with a heavy weapon mounted on the back.” [1]
I don't know about syria, but in large parts of southern africa (botswana, mozambique, ...) Toyota Hilux and Isuzu pickups have a large share of the car market. They're sturdy, hard to kill and every mechanic knows the cars. I literally had a mechanic rewire the engine of our Isuzu on a bush road after large parts of the wire harness ended up wrapped around the drive train. Took him like two hours but not a single look in the tech manual.
Trend? This is decades old. In Somalia in the 90s they were called "technicals". And the Chadian-Libyan conflict in the 80s has been dubbed the "Toyota War".
