Paris
The Taliban has been showing off its own “special forces” on social media, soldiers in new uniforms equipped with looted American equipment who contrast sharply with the image of the usual Afghan insurgent.
Pictures and videos of fighters in the so-called “Badri 313” unit have been posted online for propaganda purposes to underline how the Taliban have better equipped and trained men at their disposal than in the past, experts say. The soldiers are shown in uniforms, boots, balaclavas and body armor similar to those worn by special forces around the world — and unlike the shalwar kameez, turban and sandals of the traditional Taliban fighter.
Rather than a battered Russian-designed Kalashnikov rifle slung over their shoulder, the men of Badri 313 hold new US-made rifles such as the M4, sometimes with night-vision goggles and advanced gunsights.
Badri 313 “likely represents some of the best trained and equipped fighters within the Taliban more broadly, although as you would expect there is a degree of sensationalizing in propaganda coverage of the unit by the group,” Matt Henman from the
Janes defense consultancy said.
A Western weapons expert who writes anonymously on Twitter under the pseudonym of Calibre Obscura said the unit would be no match for Western special forces, or those of India or Pakistan.
But “they are more effective than normal Taliban and certainly more than standard Afghan national army troops from a couple of weeks ago,” he said.
The Taliban unit could number up to several thousand men, experts say. The amount of equipment at their disposal is unclear, but multiple pictures online show jubilant Taliban fighters posing with captured armored Humvees, aircraft and weapons
abandoned by the defeated US-equipped Afghan national army.
In a social media post, Badri 313 troops even mocked their US counterparts by recreating the famed picture of American soldiers raising the Stars and Stripes on the island of Iwo Jima in 1945.
The Taliban figures in uniforms are seen raising their black-and-white flag. Badri 313 is also seen as having benefited from training from the Haqqani network, Afghanistan’s most ruthless and feared militant group which has been responsible for multiple
suicide attacks on civilian targets.–AFP
