US Military Gear Smuggled en Masse Out of Afghanistan

Region Awash in Cheap US Military Equipment

It’s not easy to get products made by US companies in Iran after years of sanctions and acrimony. It’s ridiculously easy, however, to get US military equipment there.

Another side effect of the US occupation of Afghanistan, and the ridiculous levels of corruption in that company, US military gear of all shapes and sizes, from clothes to tools to weapons, are available throughout the region, with one bazaar in southern Iran claiming they could get virtually anything from a “supplier” in Afghanistan.

And they mean anything. While most of the goods for show in the bazaar were things like tool cases and clothing and shoes, one showed off night-vision equipment and another even claimed to be trying to sell a whole Boeing AH-64 Apache helicopter.

During the many escalations in Afghanistan, the US sent so many shipping crates full of equipment to Afghanistan that it is expected to take years just to open and catalog it all. Most of it has just sat there in seemingly unopened containers.

But maybe not so unopened. Canada’s military, when they were pulling out, had the came problem on a smaller scale, and on opening the containers found many of them filled with sand and rocks. The gear was never accounted for.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.