![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Stijn Mitzer and Joost Oliemans at the Oryx blog have been keeping tabs on the items destroyed or captured by the Taliban through photographic evidence. The group's considerable gains have enabled it to capture huge quanities of western equipment supplied to the Afghan security forces. The militants have taken control of around a third of the country's 421 districts and its attacks in recent days have sent more than 1,000 Afghan soldiers fleeing across the border into Tajikistan. and its allies approach the end game amid a Taliban resurgence. Those losses are now being eclipsed in Afghanistan as the U.S. military hardware hit the front pages again in the mid-2010s once again when ISIS overran large swathes of Iraq, capturing modern M1 Abrams tanks and a huge quantity of HMMWVs that were supplied to the Iraqi army. The New York Times estimated that the largely serviceable equipment was worth around $2 billion at the time, or $9.6 billion in 2020 dollars. That hardware list included everything from F-5 fighter jets and UH-1 Huey helicopters to M48 tanks and armoured personnel carriers with the Vietnamese People's Army sending some items to the USSR for study. The current situation in Afghanistan is bringing back uncomfortable memories of when the United States pulled out of Vietnam, leaving a vast bonanza of military equipment behind it. ![]()
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