Sahel Conflicts: More Terrorists, Troops, and Civilians

 I'm back with the last of my modern African figures; the storage box is finally full, so there will be no more expansions beyond this and the remaining vehicles on the painting table.

Motorcycles seem to be a popular mode of transportation in Mali for various militias and terrorist groups, and I received a few as part of my Miksa Miniatures Kickstarter pledge. They weren't enough to field a full unit, but Eureka Miniatures had a set of Australian SAS soldiers in headscarves that I converted.

As part of the conversion work, I ordered a Russian weapon sprue from Miniature Building Authority. Unfortunately, they were more 32mm in size and looked huge on the figures, so I had to try and cut them down a bit to make them look more appropriate. In the end, they were still oversized when compared to the Miska AK47, but I think it looked ok overall. Straps for the weapons were made from thin strips of plasticard.  

One of the stretch goals from the Miska Kickstarter was an insurgent with improvised rockets. I couldn't find any real world photos to help with painting, so used some Hamas rockets as references.

The final items from Miska in this update were a set of civilians. They were slightly taller than the Eureka civilians, but not enough to be distracting.  For clothing, I used some photos of civilians from the Timbuktu as reference.

To complete the civilians, I ordered a few herds of goats from Eureka. Depending on the scenario, they could either be static terrain pieces or join the civilians as moving variables/complications on the battlefield (perhaps with an IED tied to one of them).

Finally, I ordered some African militants off of Etsy that were designed by CombatOctopus. The figures were comparable in size with my other 3D prints, but one odd thing about them was that the head sizes were smaller than the other manufactures. To me, they looked like 25mm heads on 28mm bodies, particularly the heads in caps. However, I think they will be fine on the table. I left them as generic soldiers, and they will either function as poorly equipped Malian soldiers (they have no body armor), mercenaries, or bandits.