Kabul Scare: Terror Groups and Anti-Aircraft Missiles
No
one knows the number of MANPADS left behind in Kabul. But the DoD-linked RAND
Corp estimated 4,500 last year.
The exact number
of missiles and their origin, kind, age and viability are hard to come
by. A 2019 report by the RAND Corp. think tank put the total at an
alarming 4,500, but experts consulted by SpyTalk called that figure
unreliable. That number almost certainly represents the number of MANPADS
acquired by successive Kabul regimes going back decades, they say. Any left
today is likely a fraction of that. Still, even a
fraction of MANPADS in the hands of the Taliban, Al-Qaeda or ISIS-K, an Islamic State faction active in Afghanistan and elsewhere
nearby, is alarming. Elements of the terror groups have entered Kabul,
according to current reports. “There
is a strong possibility ISIS-K is trying to carry off an attack at the
airport," a U.S. defense official told CNN Saturday. A senior diplomat in Kabul also told CNN
that officials “are aware of a credible but not immediate threat by Islamic
State against Americans at Hamid Karzai International Airport.” The U.S.
military has been establishing “alternative routes” to the airport to avoid
terror operatives, CNN said.
It could not be
learned whether the alleged leftover MANPAD stocks include U.S.-made Stingers, which the CIA supplied to the Afghan mujahideen with
devastating effect against Soviet aircraft in the 1980s. After the
conflict ended in 1989, the U.S. launched an aggressive worldwide program to
buy the missiles back, but “many ,” according to a 2013 Arms
Control Organization report,
“remained unaccounted for after the conflict” despite the effort and “some
made it into the international black market and the hands of terrorists.”
A WikiLeaks
document dump in 2010
included “a dozen reports of possible attacks on Afghanistan coalition
aircraft using heat-seeking shoulder-fired missiles,” but the Pentagon
disputed their reliability.
In 2016, however,
the military-oriented news site War is Boring obtained heavily redacted documents via the Freedom of
Information Act ”that appear to show just how spooked U.S. commandos were by
extremists’ anti-air missiles. So spooked that the special operators made an
urgent request for extra defensive gear.” It said that on March 30, 2015,
“U.S. Air Force lieutenant general Thomas Trask, vice commander of U.S.
Special Operations Command, sent a so-called ‘joint urgent operational need’
memo to his superiors at the Pentagon. The request called for
gear to spot and defeat man-portable surface-to-air missiles. Censors removed
any description of the threat and any mention of where elite troops might be
in danger. But Trask’s message made it clear that, at least in that context,
the missiles posed a possibly unavoidable risk.” |
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