#t72m1

The Asad Babil tank.Beautiful,but has many flaws.Produced by Iraq as an attempt by Saddam Hussein’s regime to locally manufacture tanks.

The Asad Babil is basically a dowgraded cheap copy of an already downgraded T-72M export model, which in turn was a cheap copy of the regular early model Soviet T-72 tanks. The Iraqi "upgrades" consisted of cheaper armor, bolted on armor iron armor plates (completely useless), removed electronics and wrong shells being used (it is believed that the Russians cheated the Iraqi and sold them APDS shells with cores made of mild steel  instead of tungsten alloy.

The tank’s armor was the same as the T72M1. Despite the relative thinness, a retrofitted reinforced armor plate present both at the turret and the front upper hull seems to have been relatively effective against some shaped-charge ordnance, like the TOWs and Hellfire missiles.

Ironically, this terrible tank performed not so badly in the Iran-Iraq war, but during the Gulf war, it got torn to pieces by the Americans.