Yes, I've read about that. They are almost comically bad. Like I read that once a group of arabs(A) was ordered to help another group of arabs(B) fighting some Israelis at some fortified position.
Along the way to the fortified position, A crossed with B running away. Instead of stopping and asking what was going on, they kept going alone. When they reached the fortified position it was taken by the Israelis already and they got routed and captured.
I mean, WTF. The point is that they didn't want to disobey the order to go to that position.
They're not even conventionally that dumb or lacking technology. When the Libyans fought against Chad, they were the advanced army. They had tanks, artillery, rockets, ATGMs and so on. The soldiers were literate, the officers had gone to college. The chadians were mostly illiterate and had only pickup trucks and ATGMs. The chadians were so bad they didn't know how to fix simple mechanical problems on their pickups so their donors would just give them new trucks.
Yet the Chadians destroyed the Arabs because they wouldn't mount an attack without a direct order from a general. They wouldn't mount proper defenses. They left their tanks in the open while they slept and the chadians would just blow them up.
The chadians were bad but if they saw an undefended arab base they would go on the attack. Not much planning, sure, but they attacked without delays. While any arab action would take days to happen.
These islamists guerrillas are much better at fighting because they are very different from the average arab, they kind of have their own culture and many are not arab(many ex-soviets, afghans, pakistanis and so on).
