Taliban pledges to restore sabotaged US military equipment
Taliban fighters say the US had ‘no right’ to destroy vehicles and aircraft
By Roland Oliphant ; Suddaf Chaudry IN KABUL ; Lucy Fisher, DEPUTY POLITICAL EDITOR and Nick Allen |Telegraph
Taliban fighters said the US had “no right” to sabotage military equipment abandoned at Kabul airport and claimed they would restore many of the vehicles and aircraft to working order.
But Ben Wallace, the Defence Secretary, said he was “not sure I would worry too much about the Taliban maintaining a fleet of aircraft” as it was “extremely expensive,” adding that the UK had only left a few vehicles in Afghanistan.
Mr Wallace told The Spectator the “threat is that they flog it to somebody like Wagner Group,” the Russian private military contractor, which was a “realistic possibility”.
It came as the Taliban paraded some of the US military hardware they captured.
On Wednesday, a long line of green Humvees and armoured fighting vehicles drove in single file along a highway outside Kandahar – their spiritual heartland – many flying Taliban flags.
A Black Hawk helicopter, also with a Taliban flag, was flown past the parade.
US military officials said its troops made equipment including 70 mine resistant vehicles, 27 Humvees, and 73 aircraft “permanently unusable” before they left Kabul airport on Monday night.
A Taliban member takes photos with a mobile phone at the airport in Kabul |CREDIT: Wakil Kohsar/AFP
Taliban walk in front of a military airplane a day after the US troops withdrawal from Hamid Karzai International Airport |CREDIT: Reuters
That included blowing up missile defence systems with Thermite bombs.
General Frank McKenzie, the head of US Central Command, said “those aircraft will never fly again” and will “never be able to be operated by anyone”.
Videos apparently recovered from security cameras inside vehicles and buildings, and circulated by pro-Taliban social media accounts, showed US soldiers using sledgehammers, bricks, and their feet to vandalise Humvees and other vehicles.
But Taliban commanders claimed they were prepared to invite foreign engineers to help repair them.
“We’ll repair it with our own technical team, and if we can’t we will ask for help from international partners,” said a Taliban commander in a video released on social media.
The Taliban cadre charged into Kabul airport earlier this week led by Zabiullah Mujahid, the group’s spokesman, and were astonished by the level of destruction left by the Americans.
Maulvi Ahmadullah Muttaqi, a senior Taliban member, said he was angry at the US’s behaviour. In a video shared on social media, he pointed at the damage and said: “They have no respect, this belongs to the Afghan people”.
He added: “They had no right to do that. But they did it because of their anti-Afghanistan mindset. At the airport, we don’t have anything operating. The US has destroyed everything, including important parts of planes with gunfire”.
A group of Taliban fighters walked over to Abbey Gate, strewn with hard-drives and even a discarded passport, and joked: “The stupidity of the Americans is just amazing, they ran scared”.
A Taliban fighter walks past a damaged aircraft at the airport in Kabul |CREDIT: Wakil Kohsar/AFP
Bill Hagerty, a Republican US senator, told The Telegraph the abandoned weapons could destabilise Central Asia, and demanded the Pentagon come up with a plan to destroy or retrieve them.
He said America had left some of the “finest military equipment in the world under the control of a hostile terrorist organisation”.
Mr Hagerty added: “And what they don’t use themselves is vulnerable to being sold to the highest bidder, which means that other nations that are not our friends could reverse engineer those.”
Meanwhile, Kabul airport was expected to reopen within days, raising hopes for Afghans trapped in the country trying to reach Britain.
Dominic Raab, the Foreign Secretary, indicated that evacuations may be able to resume from the airfield “in the near future”.
His intervention came in the wake of his admission to MPs earlier this week that the Government is not confident it knows how many people eligible to come to the UK are still in Afghanistan.
Speaking in Doha, Qatar, Mr Raab said he had enjoyed “good conversations” with Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani about the “workability” of evacuations resuming from the airport for UK nationals and Afghans who worked with the British forces and Government.
London and Doha are in talks about Qatar chartering jets to evacuate British nationals and Afghans eligible to come to the UK, according to government sources.
However, Home Office questions remain over how in-depth security checks and vetting of potential evacuees would be conducted before they leave Afghanistan, after which point Britain would be obliged to accept them from Qatar, it is understood.
The Qatari foreign minister disclosed that the Gulf state was working with Turkey on potential technical support to restart operations at Kabul Airport.
Reports and footage emerged of Qatari engineers on the ground at the site.
A British diplomatic source said: “There’s functioning to international standards so that any plane can land, then there’s functioning to the standard that specific countries can assure themselves they can land planes.
"On that latter category, it feels sooner rather than later – potentially days."