Captured Arms: From Afghanistan to Syria, Who Holds U.S. and Russian Weapons?

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Key Points: The U.S. and Russia remain major arms exporters, but their weapons often fall into unintended hands. After the Taliban’s 2021 takeover of Afghanistan, $7 billion in U.S. military equipment, including small arms, vehicles, and aircraft, were captured.

-Similarly, U.S. weapons have ended up with ISIS in Iraq and affiliate groups globally. In Syria, rebel group HTS recently seized Russian-supplied arms intended for Assad’s regime, adding to years of foreign-supplied stockpiles.

-These weapons, captured or trafficked, exacerbate conflicts, empowering groups like the Taliban, ISIS, and HTS while highlighting the unintended consequences of global arms proliferation.

Taliban’s Air Force? The Global Spread of Captured U.S. and Russian Weapons

The United States and Russia remain two of the largest exporters of military hardware – but a fair amount of weapons made in the respective nations is now in service with forces that weren’t the intended operators. This is especially true throughout the Middle East and into Central Asia.

When the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan after the U.S. pulled out in August 2021 more than $7 billion worth of U.S. equipment, which had been provided to the Western-backed government, fell into the hands of the insurgent group. A 2022 Pentagon report found that included ground vehicles worth $4.12 billion, while as many as 300,000 small arms and 1.5 million rounds of ammunition were also captured.

As Foreign Policy reported, the Taliban has an air force – something that it didn’t really possess prior to the U.S.-led invasion in late 2001.

Of course, it should be noted that the U.S. stockpiles simply replaced the vast caches of Soviet and American weapons that were used during the decade-long Soviet-Afghan War – when Washington provided aid to the Mujahedeen forces. Moreover, weapons from past conflicts go back decades, even centuries as various major powers sought to influence Afghanistan. The British Empire and Imperial Russia engaged in “The Great Game” in the 19th century, but foreign weapons can be traced back to the days of Alexander the Great and likely even earlier.

U.S. Weapons in Iran and Iraq

Two other nations operate a similar motley mix of Russian and American military hardware – Iran and Iraq. Before the Islamic Revolution in the former nation, Washington supplied all sorts of weapons, tanks, and aircraft to Iran; while Moscow similarly aided Iraq.

The Islamic Republic of Iran continues to employ the aging U.S. hardware while adopting new weapons from Russia.

After toppling the regime of Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi government was also provided aid from the United States – and like the situation in Afghanistan, a lot of it ended up in insurgent hands. In this case, it was ISIS, which obtained the Western-made weapons from Iraqi stockpiles.

What has been especially worrisome is that ISIS networks have seen small arms and other weapons trafficked to affiliate groups outside the Middle East and into Africa and beyond.

Now Syria

Foreign Policy also reported that the victorious Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) rebels may have taken control of vast quantities of the Russian-supplied arms sent to aid Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria, “assuming the weapons survived last week’s Israeli air strikes aimed at destroying large parts of that stockpile, including warships, fighter jets, and ammunition dumps.”

The news outlet explained that the matters are complicated by the fact that Moscow has aided Syria going back decades, while Russia has increased its presence in recent years. Now its regular forces and mercenaries are pulling up stakes and getting out while getting is good.

“One thing is clear: After decades of superpower sponsorship, both regimes left behind mountains of weapons and munitions supplied by their respective patron,” Foreign Policy noted in comparing the losses.

Syria has had to rebuild a few times, having lost massive amounts of hardware – including in the 1967 Six-Day War, and the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The Syrian military was rebuilt in the latter stages of the Cold War, but saw a lot of its equipment destroyed when the Syrian Civil War broke out in 2011.

Russia has continued to send military aid to Syria, even as it has become bogged down in its war in Ukraine.

According to the open-source military conflict monitor Oryx, HTS may have captured at least 150 tanks, along with artillery, armored personnel carriers, and even anti-aircraft platforms. The unknown is what the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) was able to destroy in its air strikes.

T-72. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

Yet, it seems clear that HTS, ISIS, the Taliban, and other groups are waging war with military hardware that was made in the U.S. and Russia.

Author Experience and Expertise: Peter Suciu

Peter Suciu is a Senior Editor focusing on defense issues for 19FortyFive. He has contributed to more than four dozen magazines, newspapers, and websites with over 3,500 published pieces over a twenty-year career in journalism. He regularly writes about military hardware, firearms history, cybersecurity, politics, and international affairs. Peter is also a Contributing Writer for Forbes and Clearance Jobs. You can follow him on X: @PeterSuciu – and on Bluesky: @petersuciu.bsky.social.