A video shared on Twitter by Joseph Dempsey, a research associate for defense and military analysis at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, appears to a helicopter taxiing at an Afghan airport.
In the approximately one-minute video, it is not clear who was operating the helicopter, which does not leave the ground.
Dempsey said in a post Wednesday that the video showed what he thought was a U.S.-made UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter taxiing, though not flying, at the Kandahar Airport in Afghanistan. This is the second largest airport in the country. The largest, located in Kabul, has been the site of thousands of evacuations since the Taliban took over Afghanistan from the former U.S.-backed government this month, as well as fatal bombings this week.
Could individuals from the Taliban have been operating the helicopter and could it be from the U.S. military, as Dempsey said in his posts? So far, it has not been confirmed.
However, Biden administration national security adviser Jake Sullivan said last week that the Taliban had seized a “fair amount” of U.S. weaponry after it took over the country earlier this month, according to Fox News.
“We don't have a complete picture, obviously, of where every article of defense materials has gone,” Sullivan told reporters last Tuesday, per Fox News. “But certainly, a fair amount of it has fallen into the hands of the Taliban, and, obviously, we don’t have a sense that they are going to readily hand it over to us at the airport.”
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Since the U.S. sent troops to Afghanistan following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the country has spent $83 billion on training and equipment for Afghan forces, including $147 million on Black Hawk helicopters and $2 billion on Humvees, Fox News said. Afghan soldiers did not prevent the Taliban – a fundamentalist Islamic group that governed Afghanistan circa 2001 – from taking over the country again this month.
According to the Guardian, Russia claims the Taliban have captured more than 100 Russian-made helicopters in various states of operability. However, the head of a Russian state arms exporter said the group will mostly be unable to use them with little access to maintenance crews and spare parts, said the outlet.