This is another Patreon only bonus episode and we're speaking again to our friend

Aram Shabadian probably the best person to speak to when it comes to very very

geeky details of conflict.

Today he's going to be speaking about Afghanistan's

militia air forces.

It's a mad one.

So, well, fuck you, you tell us, what are we going to be talking about today?

So basically we got today is a little special story. The Afghan Air Force more or less

dissolved as an entity in the early 1990s and was reconstituted after the American

invasion in 2001.

So there's about a 10-year period where the Air Force in Afghanistan, not the Afghan Air Force necessarily, but Air Forces in Afghanistan

were chaotic and sort of widespread.

And so it starts essentially in 1991 the Pakistan Pakistani supported Mujah Hadine forces

attacked the city of Gardez with a bunch of tanks and armored personnel carriers that they had captured from, that they've been given by Saudi Arabia.

And Saudi Arabia had captured these tanks from Iraq during the Gulf War.

So this is, you know, eight months after the 1991 Gulf War happens, Saddam's old

tanks are being used to assault airfields in Afghanistan, but unfortunately

for the Mujahideen there, they weren't very good at using tanks and mechanized weapons.

And so the Air Force of Afghanistan at the time, which was the D-R-A-A-F, the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan Air Force, they were able to obliterate the Mujahideen Forces.

So that held off the Mujahideen assault on Gardez and on the Afghan Air Forces headquarters and things like that for a while.

But by the end of 1991 and early 1992, the Afghan army had largely fallen apart meaning that the air forces

the Afghan Air Force split into different units wherever each unit was

...