Iraqi Tabuk Sniper to 800yds: Practical Accuracy (Two Rivers Arms repro)

This video is brought to you by Slate Black Industries. For grips and accessories, visit slateblackindustries.com Okay, ready? All right, let's do it. 150. Impact. 200. Got it. Okay, 250. Impact. Off the left edge, I think. Impact. And neutralize. All right, just to the windage, just one click over to the left. Cool. All right, well, 300. Impact. Did you see where? Yeah, left half. Impact. That was dead on. 350. Okay, I'm gonna start aiming at the base of the plate now. Impact. Yeah, just off the right. Okay. Impact. All right, on at four. All right, so I'm gonna aim dead on for these. Yeah. I'm feeling a little bit of wind from my back left. Yeah, about the 730 position, just picked up. Off the right. Okay. Just low. Off the left, the wind's gusty right now, in and out. Just off the left, nine o'clock. Impact. So at 450, I'm gonna basically aim at the top end of the plate then, huh? Yeah, yeah. Short. If you're at the top of the plate, you gotta be up in the strap area. Okay, got it. Ready? Yep. Just under it. How much it was getting moved because you went from being off the left. Oh yeah, immediately to the right. To being off the right, yeah. Okay. Ready? Standby, standby. Right, right, right. Okay, just off the left. Off the left, nine o'clock, perfect elevation. Impact. Okay, I had to move it to the right edge because before that, before I had to reload the mag, I was dead on. So there must have been a wind shift. All right, we're on at 500. Impact. Nice. Left half. Just off the right, three o'clock. Same spot, just off the right. Impact. Nice. Dude, that was actually quite... Quite impressive. ...quite a solid run for a 760 by 39. With ball ammo. I mean, this is not match ammo. Yeah, that was quite a good run. Well, we have an option of going to the debrief. You want to see if you can reach any further? Yeah, let's see. All right, standby. I see it. Standby. Middle beam between the two targets at the bottom of it. Is that an 800 hit? That sounded like it. I heard it. That's it. I think that's the 800. I mean, dude, 800, I think is a pretty good limit for this thing. It was basically... Tell them the debrief. The way... I mean, I'll tell you real quick where my hold was. So basically, my chevron was on top and the legs... You told me it was at the bar in between the two targets. So when I measured it, I saw that the chevron legs, one of them hit where the bar was. And so I used the leg to aim at that point at the target. And that scored me the hit at the 800. Nice. Okay, see you at the debrief. Hi, welcome back here. So when we did this shoot, the scope was actually stuck on 400 meters. And the entire shot, I only had an adjustment between 450 yards slash 400 meters to 500 yards. And it was just one click up. The rest, I had to hold under for it to hit all those targets. Now, we did manage to get the scope unstuck. But it shot the exact same score. So as far as the historical development of it, we'll go over a little bit in the debrief. If you wanted to learn more about it, Miles Vining from CLAW Report. Actually did a really good series on the Tabuk Sniper over on TFBTV. And also did a couple videos with Ian to talk about the Iraqi line of rifles. Now, this is a Two River Arms build. And so this is not an original Iraqi Tabuk Sniper. However, it's pretty good representation of it. I would say before we go, I would like to thank the rifle's owner, David, for sending an interesting specimen like this in. We've got some more Yugo stuff coming in. We've got a Yugo M70 AB2. And maybe we'll see a Yugo M76 down the road. Which I'm personally really looking forward to seeing how it works. Now I will pass everyone back over to past me. When Josh and I discussed about our run right after we shot. Thank you. All right. So here we are at the debrief. What I thought was a very positive run on this particular rifle. Here's 762 by 39. So you're going to have the implicit limitations of that caliber when it comes to how it performs in extended flight, especially with wind. And yet you were able to take it, clear out to the 500, and then even tag out to 800 with this. Right. And I know that there is internet lore about rifles in 762 by 39 going to 800 and to 1000 and beyond. And that's fine. What we've seen in testing by 39 in any sort of variable wind condition, of any sort, is that it does not do particularly well. But with this particular rifle, in the conditions we had, it did a quite darn good job. So it's got a 23-inch barrel to this. So you are pushing a little bit more on velocity. I mean, pushing a little more, sure. But I mean, if it's burnt out, it's burnt out. Right, precisely. You're not adding any more pressure to it. Precisely. So that then brings up an interesting secondary point. If, granted, yes, you've got the longer barrel, so maybe you're getting some more velocity. From the testing that I've looked at, and I know that we've not necessarily chronoed these side by side together, but from the testing I've looked at, the 7.62x39 in that mid-barrel length range doesn't change very much in the midline. If you get above the 16-inch area, you can pick up some extra velocity from what I recall in testing. But even so, it's still by 39, and you're still only going to do so much when it comes to fighting the wind. It's like a 300 blackout plus a little bit. Exactly. So that brings me to the next point of conversation with this particular system. And that is that you were able to repeatedly get impacts as we went out. And when I converse and contrast that against other Kalashnikovs that we've shot on the show, on a standard AKM or AK100 and 7.62, when we've pushed it out, we've noticed that at the 400-yard line, we start to see a depreciation where the cone of deviation and accuracy of the rifle... It just drops. It drops off to the point where you're not able to hit repeated shots on target. Which was not the case with this. Precisely. This one, you were able to, if you found the hold within another shot or two, you were able to repeat the impact. And I found that particularly interesting. No, no, it's like what I didn't think of this. I didn't think much of the Tobruk. I always thought, ah, cool thing. I was never deployed to Iraq. So that was never a thing for me to even look into. I didn't think much of an AK system with a longer barrel really being all that, you know, all that that I would really look forward to. Right. But I'm actually pleasantly surprised. Now, this is not an Iraqi arsenal build, mind you. I mean, this is a Two Rivers Arm clone. So it is built with American small... And those guys evidently put out really good work, as you would see. A very, very nice copy of the Iraqi rifle. They presumably have a better attention to detail than probably the Iraqi arsenal, knowing how some of the Tariqs came out. Right. I mean, that being said, the design concept is still there. Now, the design, however, had a lot of help from Serbia. So Zastava had a lot of input to the Iraqi arsenals coming up with this particular model. A large part of it, they were looking at the M76. You remember the 8mm that we had? Unfortunately, that one's getting rebuilt right now. But this honestly did surprise me. Especially, I don't think we talked about this yet, but the scope was... So this is an LPS, a Romanian LPS scope, which is technically incorrect, because the Iraqi ones would have been using the Zrak Yugoslav-type scopes. It's a black scope with a radio attitude. Yeah, but nonetheless, this is what we were shooting it with. It's a PSO reticle with a graduated turret. Or is it graduated? Yes. So unfortunately, when I zeroed this, I realized your normal PSOs could... You loosen the screws up and you walk the reticle back to where you grouped. This is stuck to the elevation turret. And not only is it stuck, it's stuck about 14 or 16 inches higher than my point of aim at 100 yards. Right. So effectively equating this to a... 400 yard, 450, zero. So if you look at the footage, I only did one dial. 500. Zero to 450. So you're having to hold well below the targets, effectively what would have been at the thighs or the knees of the target. Right, right. Should it be a full silhouette. I mean, that's sort of the worst case scenario of the scope if it ever gets stuck. Right. It still performed. I think that's the key, right? Effectively, if you actually had to use this in a practical setting, which is the entire premise of this exercise, and the equipment malfunctioned, which it did, you're still able to find a way to make it work. Right. Within the confines of the system. Now, you also think about it this way. So if you were in an urban environment, and I actually, after shooting this, I feel like it's actually quite an effective urban support rifle, if you think of it, right? If you're supporting like a platoon size element, and you need a marksman, this is not bad. It falls into, and this is a really interesting way to consider this, because, you know, it's kind of like very, very different worlds. But this falls into the role of the DMR, as we understand it with the Mark 12 system, does it not? I mean, I know it's a very far and distant thing from that, in terms of the capabilities. But when you consider same ammunition, same magazines, longer system than what the average person is carrying, right, you know, different magnified optics setup, less obviously the suppress capability, but it ticks a lot of the same boxes from a different area of the world. I think that's something, that's actually a really good point. I thought about that earlier too. When Iraq first came out with this, it was during the Iran-Iraq war. Imagine if you were Iraq. Logistics is a big deal for militaries. Not needing to manufacture something in a new caliber is a huge plus, because it's not just manufacturing it, it's pushing it to the front. And that's highly dependent on whether your units have, ding-a-ling Muppets as a supply sergeant or not. So, effectively, you use the same magazines as everybody else. Right, so logistically, it makes a lot of sense, right? So you can basically have somebody within your platoon, or within your group, who can be more capable at distance. Because this definitely, without a doubt, we saw, we shot, and we both felt that this was superior to a 16-inch barreled Kalashnikov at distance. Oh, absolutely. Right, so you've got... It bucked the wind so much easier. Right, for the caliber. And so you've got somebody who could basically take this, interchange it with all of the same kit that they already had, and that was running through their supply chains and their supply lines, and be much more effective in that extended range. Yeah, I think that's something that a lot of times when we look at it, I think especially us in the civilian world in America, we get really wrapped up in what caliber versus what caliber. Whereas a lot of militaries... And punching single holes, and this and that. Yeah, a lot of militaries around the world, I mean, that's not a luxury that you get to choose, because that's something that's potentially decided decades ago, and now you have stores of this caliber. I mean, classic example is the M1 Garand, designed for the 270 type caliber, and then rolled out with a 30-odd-6, because... That's what we had. Yeah. Yep. Now, I don't know of the effectiveness, because they were fighting Iran in the desert, which far exceeds the 600-meter distance. But at the same time, at that point, they were also running a lot of tanks and artillery. Right. So... My personal history on the Iran-Iraq war is hazy at best, but from what I recall, the Iraqi army was far, in a way, the stronger, more technologically advanced military force at that time. So, you know... Because Iraq lost a lot of ground to America during both... Yeah, Gulf War I and II, right? Multiple, multiple Gulf War engagements, people automatically think that Iraq was just this weak military. It, at one point, had one of the largest standing armies. Right. It was definitely the regional army of power in that area. Right. So, on top of that, there's not a lot of regional powers who are producing their own weapons. So, this is a big deal for a regional power to really push, you know, a new weapon system like this. It's interesting seeing the thought process behind it, but we've also got to keep in mind that a lot of the design and tooling also came from Serbia, which is a master at their version of the Kalashnikov system. It is, honestly, one of the best systems on reliability and accuracy and everything out there that exists. So, that's not to be taken lightly, you know? Agreed. Two River Arms did an excellent job. Yeah, clearly. This is a really, really solid build. People give American AKs a lot of grief, which rightfully, a lot of them deserve it. But this particular rendition is actually quite well built. Awesome. Well, cool. Good run. You can get updates on Ninehole Review publications and access the Practical Accuracy scoreboard to help you argue with people on the internet on which rifle performs better on the Practical Accuracy course. We maintain this newsletter to be majority gun content with Ninehole Review's updates per every email with less than 33% marketing content. Subscribe today on slateblackindustries.com This is 096, this is 096, four vix, eight packs, red con, one, green, green, time copy, over. This is 096, this is 096, roger, over. 096, 096, one, one pack, green, green, over. This is 096, roger, over. 096, 096, two, one victor, two packs, red con, one, over.