What exactly, I found myself wondering, would jihadists do without modern four-wheel-drives?
Car ads are customarily shot on the French Riviera’s Grande Corniche or on a very particular road in Tuscany that all art directors know. But the sight of 43 brand new and coruscatingly white Toyota Hiluxes rolling across the infernal Syrian-Iraq border added a hard-edge nightmare venue to the ad-man’s soft-focus dreamscape.
If there’s a micron of comfort to be had from the horrors of the Middle East, it’s that the medievalising ISIS has a keen admiration for the consumer goods their despised enemies manufacture. In an earlier conflict, The New York Times called the same Hilux ‘the ride of choice’ for Somali pirates.
Adapted for war and other atrocities, using various options and accessories not sanctioned by Toyota (including the popular, flatbed-mounted, Soviet-era DShK heavy machine-gun, endearingly known as ‘Duskha’ for ‘sweetie’), the Toyota is known as a ‘technical’.
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