Taliban fighters show off US military uniforms, weapons in propaganda videos and on Afghan streets

US poured more than $28billion into weapons for Afghan forces; now the Taliban is flaunting what remains

Less than a week after the fall of Kabul, the Taliban has released a propaganda video of its fighters in full US tactical gear – as Humvees and other American equipment continue to be spotted on the streets of Afghanistan.

At a packed mosque on Friday, a senior member of a Taliban splinter group also preached to those assembled while holding a US-made M4 rifle and flanked by fighters clad in US military uniforms.

The US provided an estimated $28billion in weaponry to Afghanistan between 2002 and 2017. The overall cost of its 20-year efforts in the country – before cities fell like dominoes this month – was $83billion.

An official told Reuters that the Taliban likely controls more than 2,000 armoured vehicles and up to 40 aircraft – including helicopters and drones. Social media images have pictured fighters armed with everything from M4, M18 and M24 sniper rifles to night vision goggles and other gear.

“Everything that hasn’t been destroyed is the Taliban’s now,” another US official told Reuters.

The propaganda video posted this week to various Taliban and Taliban-friendly channels features interviews with fighters, footage of them utilising US equipment and even a soundtrack.

The Taliban was reportedly boasting of a unit called Badri 313 Battalion, something of a special-ops elite force.

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

That clearly played into the mindset of Khalil Haqqani, a designated terrorist with a $5million bounty on his head, when he preached in Kabul on Friday holding an American assault weapon.

Another propaganda photo appeared to show Taliban fighters, again outfitted in full US military gear, raising the group’s white flag in an imitation of the world-famous 1945 photo that captured American soldiers raising the US flag in Iwo Jima.

The switch to US military uniforms may be good for optics when it comes to Taliban propaganda, but it’s extremely different from the group’s trademark style of sneakers, traditional dress and AK-47s. But the Taliban is still in possession of Russian-made weapons and aircrafts in addition to its new stockpile from the US.

While some Taliban supporters were donning American garb, policemen and members of the Afghan defence forces were changing out of their own uniforms as the hardline Taliban advanced.

The New York Times reported this week that “no amount of American training and matériel ... was sufficient to create a security force willing to fight and die for a besieged nation that American forces were leaving behind.”

As Afghan citizens and foreigners swarm airports and borders in an attempt to flee, however, one consolation could be that the Taliban likely does not have sufficient knowledge to use more sophisticated weapons systems and aircraft, Yousif told The Hill.

“They may be able to manage a flight or two or to operate them in some really limited capacity in the short term, but without long-term sustainment, maintenance, servicing, that sort of thing, it wouldn’t turn into a robust or useful military capability,” he said. “It took the Afghans and the United States a long time to develop an indigenous air capability, and even then, they were reliant on the United States to keep those planes in the sky.”

That still doesn’t take the dangers away regarding the other weapons left behind, though, whether rifles, grenades or anything else – and those dangers are not limited to Afghanistan.

“They are easy to maintain, easy to learn how to use, easy to transport,” he told The Hill. “The concern for all small arms is that they are durable goods and they can be transferred, sold. We’ve seen this before where a conflict ends and the arms that stay there make their way to all parts of the world.”