KABUL: Video footage has surfaced on social media that shows a US-made Black Hawk helicopter flying over Afghanistan’s Kandahar province, with a person seen hanging below from a rope. However, on Tuesday it was not immediately clear whether the person was dead or alive.
Later, it was clarified that an Afghan pilot was reportedly flying the chopper, and a Taliban member was trying to install the group’s flag. “Afghan pilot flying this is someone I have known over the years. He was trained in the US and UAE, he confirmed to me that he flew the Blackhawk helicopter. Taliban fighter seen here was trying to install Taliban flag from air but it didn’t work in the end,” Afghan journalist Bilal Sarwary tweeted. A week earlier, local media reports said that the Taliban had captured the US military’s biometric devices compromising crucial data of its Army, along with other US military equipment.
Earlier this month, the White House said that it believes that the Taliban won’t return US weapons that it captured from Afghan forces. In mid-August, US National Security Advisor (NSA) Jake Sullivan had said that the Biden administration believes that a “fair amount” of the weapons that the US gave to Afghanistan are in the possession of the Taliban, and the White House doesn’t expect they will be returned to the US.
“We don’t have a complete picture, obviously, of where every article of defence materials has gone but certainly, a fair amount of it has fallen into the hands of the Taliban, and obviously, we don’t have a sense that they are going to readily hand it over to us at the airport,” he added.
