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Hundreds of American Humvees have been left to rust in scrapyards across Afghanistan, three years after the US abandoned the trucks – so emblematic of its military campaign in the country – to the new Taliban regime.
New satellite images from former Nato and US bases in several Afghan provinces show the US-made vehicles dismantled and hollowed out, with their parts haphazardly strewn around open-air garages and compounds.
The US forces tried to dismantle or destroy much of their machinery, from aircraft to computer systems, in the last weeks of their chaotic pull-out from Afghanistan after 20 years of war. But much still fell to the Taliban in August 2021 when the US-trained Afghan military crumbled and surrendered to the Islamist militants, according to US defence officials.
The Pentagon says US forces left behind military equipment worth over $7.2bn at the time. Glimpses of this leftover military hardware are occasionally seen at Taliban events, such as a grand parade held by the Taliban at Bagram airbase in August to mark their three years in power.
Images from the immediate aftermath of the pull-out showed Taliban militants seizing US-supplied firepower, including guns, ammunition, helicopters and other modern military equipment.
The Independent has analysed images from Kabul, Kandahar, Herat, Khost and Ghazni which show Humvees, along with other military and heavy vehicles such as rangers and army tracks that were given by the American armed forces to the Afghan National Defence Security Forces (ANDSF) and police authorities before the fall of Kabul in August 2021.
The majority of these Humvees are seen in images from the two power centres in Afghanistan – Kabul and Kandahar – with several in the backyard of the Kabul International Airport. Most of the Humvees in Kandahar are also seen at the now-abandoned US military-run airbase near the Spin Boldak road.
Contrasting the available images from 2019 and 2020, when the US and Afghan forces jointly managed the bases, with images from now, under the Taliban regime, shows the poor state of these vehicles.
Qais Alamdar, an open source intelligence researcher and analyst, confirms to The Independent that at least 20 geolocated coordinates from Afghanistan show abandoned Humvees, as well as other armoured vehicles, trucks and tanks.
“The comparison [of images] from before the Taliban took over shows that they are no longer able to upkeep this expensive Nato machinery, and there are several reasons for it – including the maintenance and expensive fuel to run them,” he says.
In the first few months of their takeover, the Taliban were using these Humvees alongside pick-up trucks to patrol parts of Afghan provinces, but over the years they seem to have junked them by the dozen, Mr Alamdar says.
Besmillah Taban, former general director of the Crime Investigation Department (CID) under the Ashraf Ghani government, says the fuel to run Humvees is more expensive and the spare parts to repair them are impossible to get outside of US and European markets.
“It’s not just the fuel, which guzzles five to six times more than an average vehicle, but you cannot find even a small part of the Humvee in the Afghan bazar. You have to order from the United Arab Emirates. The maintenance of the Humvee is turning out to be costly and, frankly, out of the budget for the Taliban,” he says.
“The Taliban’s local leaders now seem to have switched to using motorcycles to carry out patrolling, especially in areas like Baghlan and Badakhshan,” he says.
Mr Taban, who worked in Kabul near the places where the Humvees have been disposed of, says the mechanics who worked for Nato forces are now in the US or other parts of the world, and afraid to return to Afghanistan.
“Even if you manage to buy a spare part or fix a Humvee in such dire conditions, you can do it for 10 to 12 Humvees, not 100 or 200 Humvees,” Mr Taban says.
As a result, the Humvees are now a mere showpiece of stolen American equipment, stationed at border checkpoints in the country.
In a rare show of force, a column of Humvees was used to guard the procession at the funeral of the senior Taliban minister Khalil Haqqani, who was killed in a suicide bombing attack last week. Sources present at his funeral told The Independent that a convoy of around 30 to 40 Humvees was placed in a line at the burial in Paktia province.
In the absence of spare parts, the Taliban is cannibalising these Humvees, says Lynne O’Donnell, journalist and analyst on Afghanistan. The satellite images showed several Humvees that appeared to have been broken down or hollowed out completely.
Pointing to how the Taliban was able fix Black Hawk helicopters and other US military aircraft that they flew in Afghanistan, she says the US trained the Afghan military to repair and maintain the billions of dollars worth of materiel that was transferred to the republic to build its military capacity.
The US spent around $83bn to develop and sustain Afghan security forces from 2001 to 2021, according to reports from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (Sigar), which oversees American taxpayers’ money spent on the conflict.
Ahmad Zia Saraj, who served as Afghanistan’s spy chief from 2019 to 2021, says there is a concern that the Taliban will be able to raise funds by selling off parts of former US military hardware on the black market via neighbours like Pakistan and Iran.
“As soon as the Taliban took over the depots of the ministry of defence, they were looted, they stole a lot of things, weapons, ammunition, and these spare parts of these vehicles, and all of them were sold in the black markets of Pakistan,” he says.
“Soon they will just sell these Nato vehicles like scrap and of course, the market will be Pakistan and how Pakistan will use it later on,” he says.
