“Iran either bought the vehicles from the Taliban or just took them from Afghan soldiers,” analysts speculate.
By Josh Plank, World Israel News
American military vehicles, allegedly left behind by U.S. forces in Afghanistan, were spotted in transport on a road east of the Iranian capital of Tehran on Wednesday, according to reports circulating on social media.
Kian Sharifi, a journalist focused on Iranian politics and social media for BBC Monitoring, tweeted several photographs of the vehicles on Wednesday.
“An Iranian Telegram channel that covers military stories has released these ‘exclusive’ images that purportedly show Humvees and other military vehicles spotted on the Semnan-Garmsar road in Iran,” said Sharifi.
“What I am certain of is that those are Humvees and that is an Iranian road,” he said.
Bismillah Khan Mohammadi, Afghanistan’s former defense minister, tweeted a similar image.
Mohammadi called Iran a “bad neighbor,” and said, ” Afghanistan’s bad days won’t last forever.”
According to Sharifi, there are at least two possibilities for how the U.S. military vehicles came under Iranian control.
“The Telegram channel speculates that Iran either bought the vehicles from the Taliban or just took them from Afghan soldiers that drove across the border last month in an attempt to flee the Taliban,” he said.
Sharifi also retweeted a video from mid-August, purportedly showing a convoy of Afghan army vehicles, including Humvees, fleeing to Iran from fear of Taliban capture.
In a speech on Tuesday, President Joe Biden spoke of his decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan on August 31.
“The assumption was that more than 300,000 Afghan National Security Forces that we had trained over the past two decades and equipped would be a strong adversary in their civil wars with the Taliban,” said Biden.
“That assumption — that the Afghan government would be able to hold on for a period of time beyond military drawdown — turned out not to be accurate,” he said.
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi welcomed the departure of U.S. troops from the neighboring country.
“America’s military defeat and its withdrawal must become an opportunity to restore life, security, and durable peace in Afghanistan,” Raisi said last month, according to Iran’s state TV.