New Kabul Scare: Terror Groups and Anti-Aircraft Missiles
No one knows the number of MANPADS left behind in Kabul, if any. But the DoD-linked RAND Corp estimated 4,500 last year.
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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 4,50O, but experts consulted by SpyTalk called that figure unreliable. That number almost certainly represents the number of MANPADS—Man Portable Air Defense Systems—acquired by successive Kabul regimes going back decades, they say. It’s highly unlikely, the experts say, that Washington supplied any to Kabul. Any left today is likely a fraction of those acquired by the Taliban regime overthrown by the U.S. in 2001, or its predecessors. The truth is that nobody seems to know the disposition of the missiles.
Still, even the possibility of a fraction of MANPADS in the ha…