Democrats, their liberal media, Never-Trump RINOs and Liz Cheney are very upset to hear Russia has been paying the Taliban to kill US soldiers in Afghanistan.
They’re not doing a very good job.
** There were 22 US deaths in Afghanistan total in 2019.
** There have been 9 US deaths in Afghanistan so far this year.
** Compare that to the 496 deaths in 2010 and 412 deaths in 2011 under Obama!
Facts matter.
The Taliban also laughs at these latest reports. In a new report at The Daily Beast the Taliban admits Russia has been paying them for US deaths for several years now back to 2014!
But for some reason it didn’t make any screaming headlines back in 2014 and 2015!
Via at Sami Yousafzai, Adam Rawnsley, Christopher Dickey, and Erin Banco at The Daily Beast:
Taliban veterans like to laugh about the first time, according to their lore, that the Russians dumped a lot of American dollars on them. During the Taliban campaign to take over all of Afghanistan in 1995, they actually had a few fighter planes, and they used one to force a Russian cargo plane—a huge Ilyushin Il-76TD flying for a company called Airstan—to land in Kandahar.
The Taliban held the Russian crew members prisoner for a year until, one day, they supposedly “escaped” and managed to take the plane with them. How many millions of dollars that took to arrange, the Taliban have never said, but after the long, bloody decade of the 1980s throwing off Soviet occupation, squeezing the Russians for money like that remains a source of amusement.
Mullah Manan Niazi, who was the spokesman for Taliban leader Mullah Omar in those days, brought up the incident when The Daily Beast asked him about reports that the Russians have offered—and perhaps paid—bounties to Taliban who kill American soldiers.
“The Russians paying U.S. dollars—it’s not odd for the Taliban,” he said, his voice fraught with irony over the encrypted phone call as he recalled the Airstan incident. As for the current situation, “The Taliban have been paid by Russian intelligence for attacks on U.S. forces—and on ISIS forces—in Afghanistan from 2014 up to the present.”
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