The Insider: Russian military intelligence paid Taliban $30m to target US soldiers

Russia’s foreign military intelligence service (GRU) paid “tens of millions” of dollars to the Taliban to target US and other foreign coalition troops in Afghanistan between 2015 and 2020, Russian investigative outlet The Insider revealed on Wednesday.

The GRU’s notorious Unit 29155, a black ops division best known for its operations to destabilise Russia’s enemies, including the failed Novichok attack on former Russian spy Sergey Skripal in the British city of Salisbury in 2018, was responsible for a campaign of targeted violence against US and coalition forces, according to The Insider.

While The New York Times first reported in 2020 that the GRU was paying bounties to Taliban militants for killing coalition troops, The Insider’s investigation has now revealed the full extent of the scheme, reporting that Unit 29155 ran at least three networks of Afghan couriers charged with delivering cash bounties to the Taliban and other armed militant groups for successful military assassinations.

Citing anonymous sources within Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security (NDS), The Insider said that fighters were rewarded an average of $200,000 per US or coalition soldier killed, with smaller sums awarded for the killing of Afghan troops and security guards.

According to one NDS official, the GRU payments totalled around $30 million, describing the sum as “a small amount to give the United States a bloody nose”. The couriers who delivered the cash awards to Taliban fighters were granted asylum in Russia upon completing their missions, The Insider reported. 

The Insider named Lieutenant General Ivan Kasianenko, Unit 29155’s deputy commander, as the officer charged with overseeing the programme, while it said that GRU Colonel Alexey Arkhipov had been responsible for liaising with the Taliban. 

The most “prolific” network of couriers, meanwhile, was headed by a smuggler named Rahmatullah Azizi, who established a gemstone trading company “registered at a Moscow address connected with GRU headquarters” as a front to funnel payments from the agency to Taliban militants, The Insider said.

Despite the Taliban being on Russia’s list of terrorist organisations since 2003, the Kremlin has remained on good terms with the group since it returned to power in Kabul in 2021, and in December legislation was passed by the State Duma allowing the government to suspend a group’s terrorist designation with a view to facilitating closer ties to the group.