Watchman Report Aug. 24, 2021 "At Least 4,500 MANPADS Left For Terrorists In Afghanistan"

 

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 Taliban, its Al-Qaeda ally, and the renegade ISIS-K terror group may have inherited hundreds of deadly shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles from the fallen Afghan government’s weapons depots, experts tell SpyTalk.  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.”