Video: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8ylf8zb6n80impd/VRP62795.mp4?dl=0
This is the bizarre moment Taliban fighters turned an abandoned Russian military plane into a makeshift swing and played on it.
The militants were filmed laughing in delight as they took turns pushing one man on the swing attached to the wing of the rusted aircraft.
They were playing on a Russian Antonov An-32 which was produced in the 1980s and left in the country during the Soviet Union’s occupation.
Chinese officials wrongly claimed that it was a U.S. military plane. Chinese governmental official Lijian Zhao, the spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry, said: ‘The graveyard of EMPIRES and their WAR MACHINES. Talibans have turned their planes into swings and toys.’
Taliban members had also previously been recorded having fun while riding dodgems and carousels at an amusement park in Kabul amid their takeover of Afghanistan mid-August.
Taliban forces seized the country on August 15, forcing American soldiers into a frenzied exit which was completed on August 30.
The jihadist soldiers were seen victoriously parading abandoned U.S. military hardware around the cities of Kandahar and Kunduz early September.
Marine General Frank McKenzie, commander of the U.S. Central Command, previously said dozens of military equipment, vehicles, and aircraft have been ‘demilitarized’ prior to U.S. withdrawal, rendering them useless to Taliban soldiers.
He said: ‘It’s a complex procedure, complex and time-intensive procedure to break down those systems so we de-militarized those systems so that they’ll never be used again, and we just felt it more important to protect our forces than to bring those systems back.’
Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby said the U.S. was ‘not overly concerned’ about the Taliban’s seizure of American weaponry.
He said: ‘They can inspect all they want, they can look at them, they can walk around, but they can’t fly them.’
‘The only thing that we left operable are a couple of fire trucks and some forklifts so that the airport itself can remain more operational going forward.’