Videos of Taliban fighters riding on US-made armoured personnel carriers and climbing on US-made Black Hawk helicopters have emerged online
According to the Al-Arabiya channel, the United States supplied significant amounts of military equipment to the Afghan National Army shortly before the Taliban seized power. However, according to a July 2021 report by the U.S. government’s Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), ten delivered arms and military equipment (AME) as well as ammunition and uniforms alone cost an estimated $212 million.
The SIGAR report identifies the following 10 of the most expensive items of AME, ammunition and equipment delivered in the second quarter of this year, from April through June:
1. six A-29 light attack aircraft ($133.513 million);
2. Nearly 200 M1151 HMMWV armoured vehicles ($41.5 million);
3. about 100,000 2.75″ rockets ($18.480 million);
4. Over 60,000 40mm high-explosive fragmentation ammunition ($4.563 million);
5. 88,709 uniform shirts of various sizes ($3.597 million (;
6. 884,880 rounds of 12.7 mm ammunition ($2.704 million);
7. More than 300 hydraulic vehicle transmissions ($2.340 million);
8. Eighty-one diesel engines ($3.145 million);
9. Over two million rounds of 7.62 mm ammunition ($1.512 million);
10. Almost five million 5.56 mm ammunition ($1.039 million).
Some of the listed weapons ended up in the hands of Taliban fighters (an organisation banned in the Russian Federation), the pan-Arab TV channel noted.
In recent days, videos have emerged of Taliban fighters riding on US-made armoured personnel carriers and climbing onto US-made Black Hawk helicopters. Earlier, the Pentagon had pointed out that during the withdrawal from Afghanistan the Americans had removed “a huge amount of their own military equipment and handed some of it over to the Afghan army.