Most of the ruins were looted by the Assad regime and its supporters. Leaving the area to be seized by ISIS on purpose.

Well this could be solved with integration or acceptance tests.

Anyhow, TDD doesn't promise you bug free code.

The author is complaining that when requirements change that his tests need to be updated/rewritten.

Is he joking? I mean if the updated requirement changes the behavior of the code then the test better freaking fail and require the test to be updated, otherwise the test (if it even exists) is terrible.