Russian intelligence maintained close ties with the Taliban movement in Afghanistan and financed attacks against American troops in the 2010s, according to an investigation by journalists from The Insider and Spiegel.
According to the investigation, from 2016 to 2020, the Taliban carried out a series of attacks on US military bases in Afghanistan and terrorist attacks in their immediate vicinity. Among the dead and injured were not only American soldiers but also Afghan army personnel and civilians. These attacks, according to the investigation, were inspired by the GRU. For each killed American soldier, their perpetrators received up to $200,000. In total, Russia could have paid the Taliban about $30 million over these years, according to former employees of the National Security Agency of Afghanistan.
The money was transferred to Afghanistan by couriers with Russian passports issued through the GRU. The operations were planned by the GRU unit 29115, which according to investigations, was involved in the poisoning of the Skripals in Salisbury, the explosion at an ammunition depot in the Czech Republic’s Vrbětice, and other sabotage outside Russia. The aim of the Russian-funded attacks was allegedly to put pressure on the United States to withdraw its troops from the country.
The authors, in claiming that Moscow paid the Taliban for terrorist attacks against US servicemen, cite statements by former Afghan intelligence officers, as well as data they discovered about the GRU recruiting former smugglers, the Azizi brothers, whom the Afghan intelligence services linked to the Taliban payment scheme. They also name the alleged GRU curators of the scheme.
In 2020, a leaked report from US intelligence agencies revealed that Russian authorities had likely paid the Taliban to kill US and Western coalition soldiers. The Taliban leadership denied the allegations, saying that the attacks on US troops were spontaneous, self-financed, and preceded a deal with the Donald Trump administration to stop attacking Americans. The White House denied having any specific information about a secret Russian program to reward the Taliban for killing US troops. As The Insider notes, already in 2021, that is, under the Joe Biden administration, the White House called reports of possible Russian payments to the Taliban “based on low- to medium-level evidence.”
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