Kabul/New Delhi: Taliban has captured a staggering 700 trucks and Humvees from the Afghan security forces as well as dozens of armoured vehicles and artillery systems in June, Forbes reported.
Also, more than 1,000 Afghan troops fled into neighbouring Tajikistan in the early hours of Monday after clashes with the Taliban, the Central Asian country’s national security committee said.
The shocking numbers reflect that local defence forces in some districts are evaporating in the face of the Taliban pressure, sometimes without a fight, due in part to the perception that the government is doomed due to the imminent US withdrawal from Afghanistan later this year.
And that in turn implies huge volumes of military equipment donated or sold to Afghanistan to help it fight the Taliban may instead continue pouring into that very group’s hands, an investigation of imagery posted on social media concludes.
The tally come from a open-source investigative report published at the Oryx blog by Stijn Mitzer and Joost Oliemans.
The continuously updated tally has catalogued hundreds of photos posted online by the Taliban of destroyed or captured Afghan military equipment.
As of the evening of June 30, the study found evidence of 715 light vehicles falling into Taliban hands, with another 65 destroyed.
Obviously, there are likely many more lost vehicles that gave gone uncounted due to not being recorded in photos or videos.
For context, in 2018 the Afghan armed forces operated 26,000 vehicles including 13,000 Humvees of various marks, while Mitzer writes that a total of 25,000 Humvees have been transferred to Afghanistan by 2021.
During periods of intensified fighting, the Afghan government typically lost 100 Humvees a week, the report said.
If the Taliban can source the necessary fuel, its growing vehicle inventory could improve the group’s operational mobility, ie. its ability to mass forces across Afghanistan.
The vehicles may also serve as carriers for heavy support weapons such as mortars, heavy machine guns and recoilless rifles.
The Taliban has also used captured Humvees to infiltrate government perimeters to mount deadly suicide bombings, the report said.
Armoured vehicles losses include a handful of old M113 APCs and Soviet tanks, but also 27 fifteen-ton M1117 armoured cars armed with a machine guns and Mark 19 automatic grenade-launchers.
As for artillery, alongside 13 shorter-range mortars, the Taliban notably captured 17 122-millimeter D-30 towed howitzers, the equivalent of an artillery battalion.
The Cold War howitzers aren’t hi-tech weapons but they remain deadly and can bombard targets up to 9.6 miles away with conventional shells, a capability likely to be exploited in an urban siege scenario.
Taliban militants have launched several major offensives in northern Afghanistan in recent weeks as US and international troops withdraw from the country, including seizing its main crossing into Tajikistan last month.
On Monday, Tajikistan’s national security committee said that 1,037 Afghan government troops had fled into the ex-Soviet country “in order to save their lives” after clashes with the Taliban during the night.
“Taking into account the principle of good neighbourliness and adhering to the position of non-interference in the internal affairs of Afghanistan, the military personnel of the Afghan government forces were allowed to enter Tajik territory,” the committee said in a statement distributed by Tajikistan’s state information agency Khovar.
It said the Taliban had taken “full control” of six districts of the Badakhshan province bordering Tajikistan in Afghanistan’s northeast.
Several hundred Afghan troops had already crossed into Tajikistan after the Taliban unleashed its onslaught in early May.
The militants have seized dozens of Afghanistan’s districts, raising fears that that the Afghan military will collapse once US and international troops complete their withdrawal from the country in September.
US President Joe Biden has ordered the departure of all US forces from Afghanistan by this year’s 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks that triggered the invasion.
