Trump demands Taliban to return $7B military equipment
ALBAWABA - US President Donald Trump recently made headlines after rekindling his demand from Afghanistan's Taliban to return $7 billion worth of military equipment including aircraft, weaponry, and vehicles. His demands sparked again during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland.
Trump said during the conference while expressing his anger towards the Taliban, "We have a great, you know, I rebuilt our entire military in the first term. We left a lot of it, although a lot of it, but very small, relatively, in Afghanistan."
He added, "The Taliban has it. You know, they have their parade every year where they take our military vehicles and run them up some little street, and like it's their form of a military parade, and it makes me angry when I see that. Angry. When I see that, I get angry."
JUST IN: 🇺🇸 President Trump calls on the Taliban to return the $7,000,000,000 worth of US military equipment left behind in Joe Biden's Afghanistan withdrawal. pic.twitter.com/qv57SkBNgV — BRICS News (@BRICSinfo) February 23, 2025
The President also further claimed that the US is providing Afghanistan with "about two or two and a half billion dollars" a year in financial aid, stressing how this sum could be used to improve the US instead. Additionally, Trump stated that US assistance to Afghanistan will depend on the Taliban's return of the military equipment in question.
According to the Committee on Foreign Affairs, the US withdrew its troops from Afghanistan on Aug. 30, 2021, ending 20 years of grueling war.
Costs of War Project reports that the war resulted in the killing of at least 176,000 people, of whom were 2,402 US troops, 46,319 Afghani civilians, 69,095 military and police, and at least 52,893 opposition fighters.
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