Anxiety as Taliban seizes sensitive US military equipment

In the commotion that ensued while President Ashraf Ghani fled Afghanistan, and allowed the Taliban to topple his America-back government, the advancing Islamic fundamentalists did more than destroy 20 years of coalition effort.

The Taliban have seized U.S. military sensitive security equipment.

According to The INTERCEPT, a US-BASED investigative journalism platform, the devices were abandoned while the Taliban hit Kabul, last weekend.

The biometrics devices were used by the US military in the identification of Afghans who assisted coalition forces.

Known as HIIDE—Handheld Interagency Identity Detection Equipment—the devices falling to the Taliban have got the US authorities anxious.

The devices contain identifying biometric data such as iris scans and fingerprints, as well as biographical information, and are used to access large centralized databases.

The data could be compromised and used against the US and its Afghan allies.

While billed by the U.S. military as a means of tracking terrorists and other insurgents, biometric data on Afghans who assisted the U.S. was also widely collected and used in identification cards, sources told the INTERCEPT.

The US and its European and Western allies pulled out of Afghanistan finally after 20 years of occupation to degrade the Taliban and its terrorist affiliates.