Billions of dollars of US weapons seized by Taliban

The Taliban in Afghanistan have seized billions of dollars of US weapons following the quick collapse of Afghan security forces that were equipped with the American military equipment.

Black Hawk helicopters and A-29 Super Tucano attack aircraft are among the items captured by the Taliban, according to reports published on Thursday.

Taliban fights are seen in photos circulating on media clutching American-made M4 carbines and M16 rifles instead of their iconic AK-47s. And the militants have been spotted with American Humvees and mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles.

“When an armed group gets their hands on American-made weaponry, it's sort of a status symbol. It's a psychological win,” said Elias Yousif, Deputy Director of the Center for International Policy’s Security Assistance Monitor.

“Clearly, this is an indictment of the US security cooperation enterprise broadly,” he added. “It really should raise a lot of concerns about what is the wider enterprise that is going on every single day, whether that's in West Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia.”

The United States claims it has spent more than $80 billion on training and equipping Afghan security forces over the last twenty years that failed to stop the Taliban onslaught on Kabul. Rather, according to reports, a significant percentage of the US-trained Afghan security forces have joined the Taliban force.  

The United States handed over 75,898 vehicles, 599,690 weapons, 162,643 pieces of communications equipment, 208 aircraft, and 16,191 pieces of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance equipment to the Afghan forces between 2003 and 2016, according to a 2017 Government Accountability Office report.

Washington also gave Afghan forces 7,035 machine guns, 4,702 Humvees, 20,040 hand grenades, 2,520 bombs and 1,394 grenade launchers, among other equipment, from 2017 to 2019, according to a report last year from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR).

Some 46 of those aircraft are now in Uzbekistan after more than 500 Afghan government troops used them to flee Afghanistan following the collapse of the government last week. The rest have been taken over by the Taliban.

ME