Michael Safi & Akhtar Mohammad Makoii
The GuardianMon, 27 Jan 2020 17:56 UTC
The US Air Force 'low visibility' insignia on the charred fuselage of a CIA plane shot down by 'the Taliban' today
A Taliban spokesman claims the group has
shot down a US military aircraft over eastern Afghanistan.
The US military said on Monday it was investigating reports of a crash in Taliban-controlled territory.
Footage purportedly taken from the snowy wreckage site
showed the US air force insignia on the charred fuselage.A spokesman for the Taliban, Zabihullah Mujahid, said in a statement posted online: "An American invader aircraft has been shot down.
Lots of officers have been killed."
He claimed
high-ranking CIA officers had been onboard the plane. Neither the footage nor his claims could be verified.
In separate comments, Mujahid told the
Guardian the purported shoot-down "has no impact" on the ongoing negotiations over the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. "No agreement has been reached yet and Americans are continuing their attacks too."
Tariq Ghazniwal, a local journalist, said he saw two bodies but others had counted a total of five.The aircraft in the footage appeared to show
a US air force E-11 Battlefield Airborne Communications Node. It has been described by the air force as "Wi-Fi in the sky", a roving communications satellite to support missions in remote areas without existing infrastructure.
© defence-blog.com
The Taliban have occasionally been reported to have access to anti-aircraft weapons, including cases where they fired Stinger missiles of the kind
supplied to the rebels by the CIA during the 1980s Russian occupation.
In 2007, Taliban fighters were thought to have used a shoulder-mounted surface-to-air missile to shoot down a British Chinook helicopter, killing all onboard.
The Afghan government initially said a passenger jet carrying more than 80 people had crashed, but retracted the claim a few hours later.
Comment: Defence Blog
reports that the plane
"was probably E-11A aircraft assigned to 430th Expeditionary Electronic Combat Squadron. Wreck of a plane crashed today in Afghanistan looks like to be a U.S. Air Force Bombardier Global 6000 / E-11A "BACN" (Battlefield Airborne Communications Node)."
BACN is award-winning DoD 'network centric warfare' technology, the
creme de la creme of US electronic warfare technology...
Aerotime Hub
reports that the plane is
"used by the United States Air Force as a communication relay plane. The tail number reads 358, which could correspond to 11-9358, delivered to the USAF in March 2013. The aircraft has been flying with the 430th Expeditionary Electronic Combat Squadron, stationed at Kandahar Air Base, southern Afghanistan."
Question: how in heck did the Taliban shoot down
that particular plane? They don't have the tech, much less the necessary intel...
(Probable) answer: they didn't. At least, they didn't without help from neighboring state actors with the means and the motive...
Update 19:30 CETThe Taliban is
claiming a second scalp today: a helicopter shot down in Paktika province:
Translation:
"Tonight after the incident in Ghazni, an enemy military helicopter was shot down near Sharan, the capital of the Paktika province, it was completely destroyed. All people on board died."
Update 20:00 CETLocal media
reports that some documents were recovered:
Meanwhile, all General David Goldfein, the Air Force's chief of staff, could say about the incident at a press briefing was:
"It appears we have lost an aircraft..."
No sh*t, Sherlock!
Update 20:15 CETAh, finally, a more complete statement from the Pentagon...
Translation: they're going to 'eat' this attack too. Which they would do, given that global
perception of invincibility is more important to dollar supremacy than the fact of such.
That's 21st century covert wars for you!
You would have thought that would be a job better carried out by say, I dunno, a satalite maybe?