Taliban hold military parade with US-made weapons in Kabul in show of strength

aliban forces held a military cortege in Kabul on Sunday using captured American- made armoured vehicles and Russian copters in a display that showed their ongoing metamorphosis from an insurrectionary force to a regular standing army.

The Taliban operated as insurrectionary fighters for two decades but have used the large stock of munitions and outfit left before when the former Western- backed government collapsed in August to catch their forces.

The cortege was linked to the scale of 250 lately trained dogfaces, defence ministry spokesperson Enayatullah Khwarazmi said.
The exercise involved dozens of US- made M117 armoured security vehicles driving sluggishly over and down a major Kabul road with MI-17 copters patrolling above. Numerous dogfaces carried American made-M4 assault rifles.

Utmost of the munitions and outfit the Taliban forces are now using are those supplied by Washington to the American- backed government in Kabul in a shot to construct an Afghan public force able of fighting the Taliban.

Those forces melted down with the fleeing of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani from Afghanistan- leaving the Taliban to take over major military means.

Taliban officers have said that aviators, mechanics and other specialists from the former Afghan National Army would be integrated into a new force, which has also started wearing conventional military uniforms in place of the traditional Afghan apparel typically worn by their fighters.

According to a report late last time by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (Sigar), theU.S. government transferred to the Afghan government further than$ 28 billion worth of defence papers and services, including munitions, security, vehicles, night- vision bias, aircraft, and surveillance systems, from 2002 to 2017.

Some of the aircraft were flown into neighbouring Central Asian Countries by fleeing Afghan forces, but the Taliban have inherited other aircraft. It remains unclear how numerous are functional.

As the US colors departed, they destroyed further than 70 aircraft, dozens of armoured vehicles and impaired air defences before flying out of Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport following a chaotic evacuation operation.

About Author