EKO HOT BLOG reports that the Wagner Group is allegedly recruiting Afghan soldiers who previously fought alongside American troops to fight in Ukraine, insiders have revealed.
In a cruel twist of fate, thousands of former commandos who fled to Iran following the chaotic US withdrawal last year are being tempted into a “foreign legion” of overseas fighters, three former Afghan generals said.
Now they are being lured with offers of steady, £1,300-a-month payments and promises of safe havens for themselves and their families so they can avoid deportation home to what many assume would be death at the hands of the Taliban.
Abdul Raof Arghandiwal explained: “They don’t want to go fight – but they have no choice.”
The dozen or so commandos in Iran with whom he has texted feared deportation most, he explained.
Mr Arghandiwal added: “They ask me, ‘Give me a solution.
“What should we do? If we go back to Afghanistan, the Taliban will kill us.’”
The recruitment is led by the infamous Russian mercenary force Wagner Group, he claimed.
Michael Mulroy, a retired CIA officer who served in Afghanistan, said: “We didn’t get these individuals out as we promised, and now it’s coming home to roost.”
Stressing that the Afghan commandos were highly skilled, fierce fighters, he said: “I don’t want to see them in any battlefield, frankly, but certainly not fighting the Ukrainians.”
However, Mr Mulroy was skeptical that Russia would be able to persuade many Afghan commandos to join because most he knew were driven by the desire to make democracy work in their country as opposed to being guns for hire.
The recruitment comes as Russian forces reel from Ukrainian military advances and Russian President Vladimir Putin pursues a sputtering mobilisation effort, which has prompted nearly 200,000 Russian men to flee the country to escape service.
Russia’s Defence Ministry did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for Yevgeny Prigozhin, who recently acknowledged being the founder of the Wagner Group, dismissed the idea of an ongoing effort to recruit former Afghan soldiers as “crazy nonsense”.
The US Defense Department also did not reply to a request for comment, but a senior official suggested the recruiting is not surprising given that Wagner has been trying to sign up soldiers in several other countries.
It’s unclear how many Afghan special forces members who fled to Iran have been approached by Russia, but one said he was communicating via WhatsApp with roughly 400 other commandos who were weighing up offers.
Many like him feared deportation and were angry at the US for, as they saw it, abandoning them.
One former commando said: “We thought they might create a special program for us, but no one even thought about us. They just left us all in the hands of the Taliban.”
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