#107 Legend - Biden Admin Sends Your Tax Dollars to the Taliban

"Legend" is a former US Army Intel NCO and key member of Vets4NRF (National Resistance Front of Afghanistan). Legend joined the US Army at age seventeen and served on multiple deployments to the Middle East under the Department of of Defense during the Global War on Terror. He now supports the NRF, the last resistance against Taliban rule in the region. Legend is risking his anonymity to bring information to light for the American people. Much in line with recently surfaced news reports, he provides an alternate account of the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal. Most frighteningly, he reveals that the United States is sending over forty million taxpayer dollars, per week, directly to the Taliban regime. Legend also shares the growing threats that Chinese alliances are building in the region. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://lairdsuperfood.com - USE CODE "SRS" https://ziprecruiter.com/srs https://moinkbox.com/shawn https://bubsnaturals.com - USE CODE "SHAWN" https://hillsdale.edu/srs https://ShawnLikesGold.com | 855-936-GOLD #goldcopartner Legend Links: X - https://x.com/legend__001?s=21&t=c7zAp5U6kqrh-1SEPpo6Yg Website - https://www.vets4nrf.org Vets4NRF’s X - https://x.com/vets4nrf?s=21&t=c7zAp5U6kqrh-1SEPpo6Yg Vets4NRF LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/vets4nrf Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram | Download Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:31Speaker 01

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• 1:05Shawn Ryan?

  Legend, welcome to the show, brother. Thank you for having me. It's an honor. It's an honor to have you here. We met several months ago at Scott Mann's play here in Franklin, and I've kind of kept in touch ever since. And we've been wanting to get you on to talk about the withdrawal, the money that's going to the Taliban. I think there are very few people around that have a more in-depth insight than you do. And so, this is going to be a heavy episode, but I just want to say that I really appreciate you coming. And I know this is going to be very eye-opening to a lot of Americans and probably the world.

• 1:48Shawn Ryan?

  Before we get any farther into the interview, Legend, I just wanted to explain to the audience why the camera shots are different. Your true name and face can never be revealed, at least not right now, due to the fact that you still travel over to Afghanistan and fight and are a member of the NRF, which is the Afghan National Resistance Front.

• 2:14Shawn Ryan?

  Fighting force. Just wanted to make that clear. Now we can carry on. Well, thank you for inviting me. It's my pleasure. I never thought that 23 years after 9/11, I would have to come here to the Sean Ryan Show to tell the world that the Taliban is a terrorist group. And I'm here. And we're doing just that. It's a real shame, isn't it? It is, absolutely. But, um, but let me give you an introduction real quick. So you were born in war in Afghanistan. You immigrated to the United States before 9/11. You joined the US Army as a linguist and in the intelligence community as an analyst. You deployed to Afghanistan to Kost, Bagram, and Kabul.

• 2:58Shawn Ryan?

  Returned to the US to train Afghan forces pre-deployment. You returned to Afghanistan with the Department of Defense, and now you are part of the NRF, the Afghan National Resistance Front. And you're here to get us up to speed on the US-Taliban relations. And I think that's the primary goal of this. And, um, as much as I can't wait to dive in, I'm kind of, uh, I'm very concerned about what I'm gonna hear, and I think the rest of the world will be too. I think you'll be surprised. But, um, but before we, before we get too serious, everybody gets a gift. Everybody gets a gift, so.

• 3:44Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, wow, ranch. Little ranch dressing for you. So, you know, after our dinner last night, you said when you came to America, you had a ranch addiction and it went on everything. And there's also some gummy bears in there for you. I am still addicted to ranch.

• 4:00Shawn Ryan?

  Well, maybe you could dump them on those gummy bears. Well, today you also get a gift, Sean. Oh, nice. I love gifts. I love gifts.

• 4:09Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, boy. I should have warned you. It may make you sad.

• 4:16Shawn Ryan?

  What is this?

• 4:18Speaker 03

  This is a flag that the Taliban burned in 2022. We recovered it from Afghanistan.

• 4:28Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man.

• 4:29Speaker 03

  This is when the Taliban were celebrating their first year anniversary in Kabul. This is what they were doing, enchanting "Death to America" all over Kabul.

• 4:39Speaker 03

  And there's a few of these flags.

• 4:41Shawn Ryan?

  You personally recovered this?

• 4:43Speaker 03

  Yes, and I gave the first one to General Joseph Botel, former U.S. Central Command CEO. The other one went to Colonel Mike Walz, Congressman Mike Walz from Florida.

• 4:55Shawn Ryan?

  Oh.

• 4:56Speaker 03

  And then the third one went to Lieutenant Colonel Scott Mann. And then you have the fourth one.

• 5:03Shawn Ryan?

  Well, thank you. That's, um, I don't know what to say. Thank you, but, uh...

• 5:10Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 5:11Shawn Ryan?

  It will be in the SRS museum in here.

• 5:17Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you.

• 5:19Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 5:21Shawn Ryan?

  Well, before we get too in the weeds about everything that's going on, I want to dig into a little bit of your background to kind of qualify you on why you're able to speak on this and how you've become so informed. So what kind of work were you doing for the U.S. Army in the global war on terrorism?

• 5:43Speaker 03

  So I joined the U.S. Army at the age of 17. And because I was born in Afghanistan, I was in a very unique position. Every general out there wanted an Afghan with them. And there were linguists, obviously, as contractors, civilians, but there weren't many Afghan Americans in the U.S. Army. So I knew the language, I knew the history of the country. I was born there, and I was an American soldier. I had a security clearance. And so I worked under the umbrella of the intelligence community, unlike other U.S. Army soldiers who have one MOS. I had an MOS too, one. But they do one specific thing.

• 6:26Speaker 03

  Where I was deployed, one day I was with the division headquarters, the next day I was with the CID at the gate. The next day I was helping during an interrogation. I was everywhere. And so my job, like I said, fell under the US Army Intelligence. I did linguistics. I deployed to Afghanistan. After my deployment, I returned to the US. I was stationed here in Fort Riley, Kansas. And we had this pilot program where we would train Afghan soldiers who would come here for training and they would go back to Afghanistan. At the same time, we also had pre-deployment training for US forces who were going to Afghanistan.

• 7:09Speaker 03

  So the US government had started this pilot program. It was to give the US soldiers a taste of Afghanistan before they go to Afghanistan. And we were there. We started this at Fort Riley. I played a very, very tiny role. We had role players in there, Afghan Americans, civilians who the government would hire and bring. And so there was a whole Afghan village inside America, inside this military base. There was a call to prayer. Everyone spoke Farsi or Pashto. There was a local villager, an elder, a mullah, a governor, and some, those Afghan soldiers who were here. And then the US soldiers would partner with them and they would go on joint missions.

• 7:53Speaker 03

  Yes, we were involved in that.

• 7:55Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting, interesting. How many times did you deploy to Afghanistan with the US government, the US Army?

• 8:04Speaker 03

  Two, one in 2007, and then an additional one with DOD in 2011.

• 8:11Shawn Ryan?

  And what kind of work were you doing over there?

• 8:13Speaker 03

  So I think we covered the army part. The other one, while I was in Afghanistan, I was still in the army, just not active duty. I was in reserves.

• 8:22Shawn Ryan?

  What, what units were you attached to?

• 8:24Speaker 03

  Eighty-second was my first unit. Then Fort Riley, the big red one, First Infantry Division, yes. And then following that, I was on a special assignment in the West Coast that also fell under the intelligence community. It's something that I cannot talk about.

• 8:41Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 8:42Speaker 03

  Yes, but it was that. And then following that, I went on my tour to Afghanistan again. And this was with the DOD under a contract. And it, it was basically similar to what?

• 8:57Speaker 03

  The CIA did what you did in Afghanistan, except I was not CIA.

• 9:01Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 9:02Speaker 03

  Yes, and we were civilians. We would do horrifies. We would get requests for information. We would go to villages, go to different places and get that information. We had recruited, I had recruited a, we had recruited, trained and maintained this network inside Afghanistan and we would collect information. We would gather information, not collect. So CIA collects, we didn't collect, we gathered. And we would submit that, we would report to anyone that needed information, whether it be ISAF, NATO allies, US Embassy, agency, anyone. US Army Intelligence, CID, anyone that needed information.

• 9:45Speaker 03

  They would send us horrifies and we would go out. So the way it worked was, as you know, when there's a US team that leaves the base in Afghanistan, goes on a mission, they have to have a certain amount of individuals, troops, vehicles. QRF has to be there, the roads have to be green. And so in my case, that wasn't the case. I had a Freedom of Movement letter from the commanding officer, which at that time was the Turkish military. And so I was out about in Kabul every day in a two-man team. It was me and my partner. We would go meet, collect the information and come back.

• 10:27Shawn Ryan?

  Was your partner also an Afghan-American?

• 10:30Speaker 03

  No, he was an American. He was a US Army Ranger, former, and then contractor. And then later on it switched and then it was one of the Turkish allies.

• 10:40Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 10:40Speaker 03

  Yes, a former Turkish, I don't remember what their intelligence agency is called, but he was from the Turkish external agency, but now he had joined, he had joined this contract, he was there as a civilian.

• 10:55Shawn Ryan?

  So this was basically, you don't have to answer this if you don't want, but this was with the Defense Intelligence Agency?

• 11:02Speaker 03

  No, no, we were on a contract working for the DOD.

• 11:05Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 11:06Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 11:07Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 11:07Speaker 03

  Not the CIA.

• 11:09Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, so, but you are essentially a spy.

• 11:15Speaker 03

  I wouldn't call it a spy. You're a spy.

• 11:17Shawn Ryan?

  I would. But, um, well, let's move on. I wanted to, I just wanted to dig in a little bit into your background because I wanted to, I wanted to qualify you to, to speak on this and, and give the audience, uh, a reason that they should be listening to you. And, um, so I want to move on to August 2021, the Afghan withdrawal.

• 11:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:42Shawn Ryan?

  How were you involved in that?

• 11:44Speaker 03

  So in August 2021, I still had family in Afghanistan.

• 11:51Speaker 03

  And I reached out to anyone I could to try to save their lives, but I didn't get any help, not from the State Department. And so I was reaching them, other veterans were reaching them, uh, individuals, very high ranking that I knew, that I reached out to for help. They reached out on my behalf, but I didn't really get any help. So when the last soldiers were pulled out of Afghanistan, August 31, I still had family there. So I had no choice but to go there myself, and I did. And once I landed there, these other veterans that I had just, uh, involved in the evacuations that I had been in touch with, they heard that I was

• 12:32Speaker 03

  there. And so they started reaching out to me. It's really funny. I remember while I was there, I spoke to a sitting US senator that called me, asking me for help.

• 12:45Speaker 03

  So he slash she, I don't want to identify that individual, but it's a sitting US senator, and he called me, asking me to save, help this, uh, American citizen that was left behind. And I was shaking my head. I'm just a veteran. There, I have, I don't, I'm not special forces. I'm not agency. They're there, and you're calling me to save an American? It's not my job. It would be my honor to do it, but why aren't you doing it? You're a United States senator.

• 13:20Speaker 03

  That's how we got involved. There were so many Americans left behind, especially after the Abbey Gate bombing. There are reports that even US passport holders were turned around from the H. Kaya. It was a mess. There were still Americans in Afghanistan right now. Yeah.

• 13:38Shawn Ryan?

  Do you know where?

• 13:39Speaker 03

  All over, all over, all over Afghanistan.

• 13:43Shawn Ryan?

  How are they surviving?

• 13:44Speaker 03

  They're in hiding. So I'll give you an example. There, you could say there's a father, American citizen in Afghanistan, and his children are Afghan citizens. And his children under the age of 18 are eligible to come with them. But let's say he has a daughter that's 23. She's not eligible to come with them. And what kind of father would leave his daughter behind? The mercy of the Taliban. So now that father has decided to stay with his family, with his daughter, okay? And now the State Department, the current administration, is saying that father has chosen to stay in Afghanistan.

• 14:27Speaker 03

  The reality is you have made it impossible for him to come. He doesn't want to stay there. There are so many Americans in Afghanistan still to this day, man.

• 14:39Shawn Ryan?

  How many Americans do you estimate are still there?

• 14:43Speaker 03

  I don't know the exact answer, but I'll tell you it's definitely not the 100 or so individuals Mr. Biden told everyone there were.

• 14:51Shawn Ryan?

  What would happen to those Americans if Taliban found them?

• 14:59Speaker 03

  Dead, beheaded.

• 15:01Shawn Ryan?

  Beheaded.

• 15:01Speaker 03

  Executed. Their families raped.

• 15:08Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think this has happened to any Americans yet?

• 15:11Speaker 03

  It is happening to people in Afghanistan on a daily basis.

• 15:19Shawn Ryan?

  At what point during the withdrawal, did you see the switch started to happen? Where the US, I mean, unfortunately abandoned our allies. We had trained for 20-plus years together. At what point did you see the US start to switch sides and back the Taliban versus our allied forces?

• 15:54Speaker 01

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• 16:22Speaker 04

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig.

• 16:26Speaker 05

  On October 2nd.

• 16:27Speaker 04

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 16:31Speaker 05

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us out. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 16:39Speaker 06

  What would happen if I stopped going? You stall, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 16:43Speaker 05

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 16:46Speaker 06

  I'm not the first nanny.

• 16:47Speaker 05

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.

• 16:53Speaker 03

  So, there's a few things there. First, you have to be careful. When you say "US," who do you mean? That's one. When "US" backed the Taliban, it's not you. You are US. I am an American. I am US. I did not do this. You did not do this. There are certain individuals that did this. It's not America. That's how the world sees it. We shouldn't. We know better. We're right here. Two, it didn't just happen all of a sudden in August 2021. This thing started during the Doha deal.

• 17:31Speaker 03

  It started in 2020. In fact, even in July of 2021, weeks, months before the official evacuation, there were US CIA officers were sending CIA and as well as US military partners of the Afghan Air Force, they were sending messages to those pilots, Afghan pilots on the ground in July, in June and July, saying, "In case of emergency, take your plane to Uzbekistan." This is in July, way before the evacuation. There were even cases where the US was giving visas to, with the US Embassy in Kabul.

• 18:16Speaker 03

  They were granting visas to commanders of forces, such as Khosr's protection force. They were evacuating the commanders and their families. So we know what a chain of command is, having both served in the military. Once you cut off that chain, you remove that commander. At the peak of battle, what happens to that chain? It deteriorates. Yes, and that's exactly what happened. But all of this started in 2020 with the Doha deal. What is the Doha deal? A conspiracy, anything but a deal, anything but a good deal for the people in Afghanistan or for us in America, for both countries.

• 18:59Speaker 03

  It only benefited the Taliban. Doha deal is a very complex issue. This is an agreement that was signed between Zalmay Khalilzat, the US ambassador for Afghanistan, the US special envoy for Afghanistan at that time. And the Taliban. They signed it in Doha. What happened was the Zalmay Khalilzat started pushing this idea with the help of the State Department, that there are good Taliban and bad Taliban. President Trump, at this point, was the president while the Doha deal was signed. He wanted an end to war.

• 19:42Speaker 03

  He wanted US service members to come home. He didn't want the US soldiers to die. And he wanted this war to end. This is something I wanted. You wanted. Everyone in Afghanistan, they were tired of war. They wanted peace. But not this type of peace that they eventually got. This is not peace. They wanted to, from the Afghan side, they were looking at this Doha deal as a way to make the Taliban mainstream, bring them into politics, drop your weapons, send in elections. What they got and said was the opposite. And so President Trump wanted an end to war. The Afghan government wanted an end to war.

• 20:25Speaker 03

  And so they said, let's give the Taliban a chance. And let's negotiate with them. And so Zalmay Khalilzat, on behalf of the US, met with the Taliban in Doha, in Qatar. And they brought, the Taliban sent Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar to Doha. Mullah Ghani Baradar is the individual Sarah Adams, the CIA target arrested. And so he was released because of the lobbying that Zalmay Khalilzat did. He was released from the prison and he was given, he was put in this mansion in Doha. And he negotiated on behalf of the Taliban. Now, that guy is the brother-in-law of the founder of Taliban. He was the chief of operations for the Taliban

• 21:10Speaker 03

  for about 15 years in Afghanistan. So all of those US soldiers that died in battle, that man is directly responsible. But now he's there. And Zalmay Khalilzat is saying, this is a good Taliban. And he wants peace. And so this is his son that we're negotiating with. It's not his son, it's his brother-in-law. His brother-in-law. The founder of the Taliban is dead. He died many, many years ago in Pakistan. This man is his brother-in-law and the co-founder of the Taliban. And that's who we're negotiating with? That's who we're negotiating with in 2020. Not we, Zalmay Khalilzat, is negotiating with him.

• 21:52Speaker 03

  And so if you, you have to know about Zalmay Khalilzat's history, his history. He, yes, he's an African-American. He's an employee at the State Department or was at that time. He was a special envoy for Afghanistan. But Zalmay Khalilzat's relationship with the Taliban goes back, many, many years back. 1999, Zalmay Khalilzat was in Houston, Texas, and he invited the Taliban to the United States, to Houston, Texas. And the Taliban were here, not just any Taliban. Amir Khan Muttaqi. Amir Khan Muttaqi today is the Foreign Minister of the Taliban, a senior Taliban cabinet official.

• 22:34Speaker 03

  And so Zalmay Khalilzat's relationship with the Taliban goes back all the way to 1999. If I, I'll say it like this. If I tell your viewers to close their eyes right now and picture Taliban, right? And then I ask you what you saw. I know what you did not see. You did not see a guy in a suit and a tie, clean-shaven, right here in the United States. But that is exactly where they are. That Zalmay Khalilzat individual, he's Taliban in mind, in action. He's been supporting the Taliban and lobbying for the Taliban since 1999. At a time when he knew, back in 1999,

• 23:16Speaker 03

  that Taliban were executing women in stadiums, they were hosting Osama bin Laden. And all of those things that the Taliban were carrying out, Zalmay Khalilzat was aware of it. He didn't care. So now going forward, now that you know Zalmay Khalilzat. He worked for the State Department. He was tasked. So President Trump wanted peace. I'll go step by step. And he asked State Department for help. Some Afghan expert. And he was given Zalmay Khalilzad. And so Zalmay Khalilzad goes to Doha, negotiates with the Taliban. And he comes up with this agreement. And there's four parts to that Doha deal. One is the US will withdraw its forces

• 24:01Speaker 03

  from Afghanistan if the following happens. The Taliban do not host al-Qaeda. The Taliban do not allow their supporters or give safe haven or any sort of support to al-Qaeda. And that Taliban agree that they will not allow al-Qaeda to use Afghanistan's soil for attacks against America and America's allies. And then the Taliban must become mainstream. They must enter into negotiations like the Doha deal with the Afghan Republic, with the constitutional republic in Afghanistan. And so, and then the Taliban agreed to a permanent ceasefire.

• 24:45Speaker 03

  And if all of these things happen, the US will withdraw. President Trump will withdraw all of the US forces. But only one of those things happened. The Taliban violated all of the others. They failed to negotiate with the Afghan government. They took over the Afghan government. They say they will not host al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda is all over Afghanistan right now.

• 25:10Shawn Ryan?

  From what I understand, al-Qaeda and Taliban are now one and the same. Is that true?

• 25:16Speaker 03

  Absolutely. There is, al-Qaeda has just opened eight new bases in Afghanistan. We can talk about al-Qaeda if that's. Yes, we can talk about. Al-Qaeda has eight new bases in Afghanistan right now. This is according to UN Security Council, UN investigations. Al-Qaeda has 16,000 fighters in Afghanistan. And Bin Laden's sons are in Qandahar and Helmand, protected by the Taliban.

• 25:48Speaker 03

  The Taliban are basically, they violated this agreement days after they signed it. I'll give you another example of the Doha deal and what the Taliban were doing back then. You know Mark Randall, US Navy veteran who disappeared in Afghanistan? Mark Randall, so he's a US Navy veteran. He's an American engineer who was in Afghanistan at around the time when the Doha deal was being negotiated between Zalmay Khalilzat and the Taliban leader. Mark Randall goes missing in Afghanistan and people start, people know Taliban and Akhoni are the ones doing all that kidnapping. They're taking American hostages.

• 26:29Speaker 03

  So people started asking Zalmay Khalilzat and the Taliban in Doha, "Well, what do you mean when you say you want peace and you want an end? And you're kidnapping Americans?" They said, "No, no, no, no, no, we have not kidnapped this American." Zalmay Khalilzat said, "Anyone who says the Taliban did this, kidnapped Mark Randall, is an enemy of peace." They're saying this in order to break down this negotiation, these talks. And so people in Afghanistan and elsewhere, they kind of took a back step. They said, "Oh, no, no, I don't want to be labeled as an enemy of peace, so I'll just stay quiet." And then the Doha deal was signed, evacuations happened, we left.

• 27:10Speaker 03

  A few months ago in 2023, Mark Randall is released by the Taliban, the Taliban who did not hold him.

• 27:19Speaker 03

  But the Biden administration, so the Taliban did not release him just

• 27:25Speaker 03

  without getting anything in return. They asked for a specific individual who was in US, in jail, a Taliban commander. And the Biden administration released him. That Taliban commander is Haji Bashir Nurzai,

• 27:42Speaker 03

  Pablo Escobar of Afghanistan, drug kingpin. Mr. Biden released him in 2023.

• 27:55Shawn Ryan?

  Let's go, before we get too into Al Qaeda and Taliban, I want to go back to what was happening during the withdrawal. It seemed, I've interviewed a number of people on this subject, and it seemed that the... It seemed like the assassinations, the... All of the carnage that started happening over there seemed like a light switch. How fast did that start happening to the Afghan people? And who will start there?

• 28:33Speaker 03

  Like I said earlier, it didn't just happen. To those in Afghanistan, they were watching this unfolding every day. And this could have been prevented. Unfortunately, at this point, Mr. Biden and his administration had won the elections, and he wasn't in charge, and he refused to support them. The president of Afghanistan at that time, Ashraf Ghani, he sent a letter to Mr. Biden requesting a list of defensive weapons that the Afghan government needed in order to defend, in order for the security forces to defend and defend the people and the country against the Taliban.

• 29:16Speaker 03

  Mr. Biden received it, and he said, "This is a wish list. He's not going to get it," knowing that the Taliban were advancing. The Zalmi Khalilzad's point, his objective was that the Taliban would circle, eventually, the Afghan presidential palace, forcing Ashraf Ghani into signing an agreement, handing over power to the Taliban. Now, Ashraf Ghani, he...

• 29:46Speaker 03

  He wasn't a good president. He had bad policies. But nevertheless, he was elected by the Afghan population. It was a democratic elected government. Now, think about this. Had Ashraf Ghani chosen to stay instead of fleeing, right? He would have handed over this government to the Taliban. And today, the Taliban would have been a government that was recognized by the whole world. So I'm not saying Ashraf Ghani was a good man who planned this. He just left. Now, the first vice president, he went to Panjshir Valley to join the resistance.

• 30:28Speaker 03

  And he took with him this legitimacy from the Taliban. He took it. Had they stayed, the Taliban had already entered Kabul. They had circled the presidential palace. They would have forced them into signing over this government, handing over the government to the Taliban. Your question was, I forgot what your question was. We're talking about the...

• 30:54Shawn Ryan?

  Basically, what I'm getting at is, what started happening to our partner forces?

• 31:02Speaker 03

  So, yes, I remember. The U.S. had stopped contract support for the Afghan forces. As I said earlier, the U.S. was granting visas to the commanders and basically destroying whole units. The command was being removed, and soldiers basically had no one to give them orders. And so, as the Taliban approached, these guys were out of ammunition. They had no air support. They had no medevac. They're injured or dying. There was no one to treat them. And the Taliban were advancing. And the Taliban did not come alone. They brought a lot of other terror networks with them. And so, they kept pushing the Afghan forces. Some were overrun.

• 31:47Speaker 03

  Some, you can see videos of how they asked the Afghans to surrender. And when the Afghan forces ran out of ammunition, ran out of bullets, they did surrender. But then the Taliban massacred all of them. And this continued all the way until the Taliban reached Kabul. They took over Kabul. And at this point...

• 32:08Speaker 03

  The resistance had been declared. All of Panjshir Valley, the Panjshir province just north of Kabul, was the only province that had not fallen to the Taliban. It was getting besieged by the Taliban on a few different fronts, from the north, from the east, from the west. And now the Taliban were approaching from the south, from Kabul, in large numbers. But most of the commandos, even from as far as Helmand and Kandahar, they got in their vehicles and taxis and any other way they could. They all came to the Panjshir Valley to defend this one place, to rally here and then start counter operations against the Taliban. So they were there.

• 32:52Speaker 03

  Unfortunately, even at that point, when Mr. Biden and the whole world saw that the Taliban were right there and they had besieged Panjshir, even at this point, he refused to help the last democratic forces in Afghanistan. And so what happened was many, many people, members of the Afghan military, were executed by the Taliban. Do you have an estimation of how many? Thousands. Thousands. It's hard to tell, man, but it's thousands. What about their families? When I went to Afghanistan, after the evacuations were over, when I went there, there were still dead bodies on the sides of the road, man. And it was still happening.

• 33:36Speaker 03

  It was in the end, they were still killing people. I saw Taliban had hanged individuals. I saw Taliban drowning a man in the river. All of these were what we call our Afghan allies, our Afghan partners. And it's continued, it's continuing. It's even happening right now as we speak. The oppression of women, revenge killings, looking for Afghan, former Afghan military, government officials, civil society. They're still attacking them, they're still killing them.

• 34:18Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think they'll stop?

• 34:19Speaker 03

  Absolutely not.

• 34:21Shawn Ryan?

  What is their goal?

• 34:23Speaker 03

  The Taliban's goal...

• 34:27Speaker 03

  Are you familiar with Al-Qaida's goal list, ISIS's goal list?

• 34:32Shawn Ryan?

  What is it?

• 34:35Speaker 03

  You are an unbeliever, according to them. Where you are, this is a camp of the unbelievers. They want to purify this. You are the end goal. I am the end goal.

• 34:49Speaker 03

  This is the end goal. And Al-Qaida's goal, Taliban's goal, they're the same.

• 34:55Shawn Ryan?

  It never stops?

• 34:56Speaker 03

  No, so, you know, sometimes you hear people say, uh... Not people, again, State Department. Uh, these individuals who are in their, inside the State Department in their cubicles, and they never leave. They, they say Al-Qaida is a problem. Taliban is not a problem. There's Taliban 2.0 and Taliban 1.0. They say this. The reality on the ground is, not that, it's different.

• 35:26Speaker 03

  The, look, the leader of the Taliban, Haibatullah Khanzada, who's in Qandahar right now, you know what his title is? His title that it's mandatory for all Afghans to address him by that title. It's Amir al-Mumineen, the commander of the believers. Which believers? I'm a believer. I'm a practicing Muslim. I am an American Muslim. That man thinks he's my commander. He's the commander and believer, commander of all the Muslims in America, all the people in Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf, in India, in Indonesia, in Europe, in America, in Canada. He's the commander of all of them.

• 36:07Speaker 03

  Now you come and you tell me, State Department tells me, "Oh, but this is Taliban 2.0. This has changed." What you don't know is Taliban's ideology. There is no difference between Taliban and Al-Qaida. Their ideology is identical. They're two sides of the same coin. They both want the same thing. They think that after Afghanistan... They're gonna link up with the army of Mahdi. And this is basically the Judgment Day is nearby. It's around the corner. And so they're gonna join, they're gonna be there. The army of Mahdi, who is gonna go to Damascus in Syria. And they're gonna link up with the Messiah. I'm not kidding, the Messiah, Jesus Christ.

• 36:51Speaker 03

  And that this is the army that will link up with Jesus Christ, march on Jerusalem, take over Jerusalem, liberate Jerusalem, and then liberate the West, liberate America, liberate Canada. When ISIS and al-Qaeda and these guys in Afghanistan, when they look at America, they don't see the United States of America. They see the Islamic State's North America province, the Islamic State's Latin American province, the Islamic State's European province. Just like Afghanistan to them is the Islamic State's Khurasan province. ISKP, what you call them.

• 37:35Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. What happened to our allies' families?

• 37:46Shawn Ryan?

  Are they being killed and persecuted as well?

• 37:49Speaker 03

  Yes, the short answer is yes. Now, who's your ally? Is it the guy that was your interpreter, your barber? Your, who's your advisor? Who's your ally? Is it the guy who, you know, 95, 96% of the people in Afghanistan did not pick up a weapon to kill Americans when Americans were there? Aren't they your allies? So who's the ally? I'm not talking to you. I'm talking to all the viewers, all the listeners. Who's the ally? So are their families getting massacred and killed by the Taliban on a daily basis? Absolutely. But if your definition of an ally is interpreter,

• 38:32Speaker 03

  and your question is if that interpreter's family, mother, father, children are getting executed? Yes.

• 38:42Shawn Ryan?

  So the Taliban's agenda in Afghanistan is to wipe out the entire ideology of anybody who took part in aiding the US, whether it was a barber, whether they were fighting alongside us, whether it was the government officials, their families, everybody.

• 39:06Speaker 03

  Exactly, but first, first them, then you.

• 39:13Shawn Ryan?

  We'll get into us here in a minute.

• 39:17Speaker 03

  Look.

• 39:17Shawn Ryan?

  Well, let's get back to the evacuation. I want to cover the evacuation before we get into the weeds on this other stuff. Let's talk about the, how many people did we evacuate? How many people did the US evacuate from Afghanistan?

• 39:30Speaker 03

  The Biden administration claims it evacuated about 120 something thousand individuals.

• 39:37Shawn Ryan?

  120 something Taliban individuals?

• 39:39Speaker 03

  Thousand individuals, 120,000.

• 39:43Shawn Ryan?

  Were any of those people vetted? Put through a background check?

• 39:48Speaker 03

  You're a professional, you work in the CIA. You tell me, is it possible to vet people, that many people in two weeks, while you're surrounded by Taliban, Al Qaeda, ISIS, there's a suicide bombing and all that chaos? You saw this stuff on TV. You tell me, is it possible to vet all of those individuals?

• 40:08Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 40:08Speaker 03

  Okay. Now, Mr. Biden can claim whatever he wants and you, this is a free country. You can believe him or you can just say, no, give me the evidence. What I can tell you is this. About the veterans, most veterans involved in this, they're all in agreement in this, that about 70% of the people that Mr. Biden evacuated were not eligible to get any of the visas. They were not vetted. They don't know who they brought out. They're figured it out, they're figuring it out right now. They're learning who they brought out now while they're already here.

• 40:54Speaker 03

  Now, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with those individuals that we brought. I am, if you said what I'm saying right now, they would call you racist, Islamophobe. They can't say the same thing to me. So, there is a process. America is a very generous country. It gave me a home, it took me in. And this is, this is going to continue. America has always been a generous country. It will continue to accept refugees legally, vetted correctly, but that is not what is happening right now. That is not what happened. Unvetted individuals, they were not the so-called allies, quote unquote. They don't know who they were. They were just people.

• 41:40Speaker 03

  And so, if you, this category of individuals that they brought,

• 41:48Speaker 03

  the whole of Afghanistan falls under that category. It's all your ally. Are you going to evacuate all 40 million of the Afghan people and bring them here?

• 42:00Speaker 03

  You tell me, is the evacuation the solution here? Or is it just a Band-Aid to this problem?

• 42:10Speaker 03

  It's a Band-Aid. Yeah?

• 42:14Speaker 03

  You were in Afghanistan too, right? You were deployed there. You trained the Afghan forces, you worked with them. What was, did you ever think that you were doing this in order to bring these guys and make them your neighbors in America? Or were you doing it so they could fight for their own country, defend their own country, keep terrorism at bay? And when Afghanistan is free and safe, America is safe. It's linked. Look at what happened on 9/11. Terrorism was in Afghanistan, America was attacked. Now, the same thing has happened again. Now, what some people are actually doing right now is they're even evacuating the Afghan commandos.

• 42:56Speaker 03

  They're evacuating or lobbying to evacuate Afghan intelligence officers, Afghan commandos, tactical teams, pilots.

• 43:07Speaker 03

  The very individuals who took the oath to defend the constitution of Afghanistan, the people of Afghanistan, now they're evacuating them and bringing them here to the United States. And once they come to the United States, they're not going to be pilots. They're not going to be CIA. They're not going to become generals in the US military. They probably won't even be able to join the military. So what they end up doing here is gas station clerks, Uber drivers. Nothing wrong with those jobs. But, and nothing wrong with some of those individuals, all of those individuals being here. But if you zoom out and look at the bigger picture, try to justify to me that bringing these professionals, trained individuals, here

• 43:52Speaker 03

  is better than for them to be in their own birth country and their homes with their families and fight for their country, defend their country, save their country. And once again, when Afghanistan is safe, America is safe.

• 44:10Shawn Ryan?

  What do our former allies think of us now?

• 44:20Speaker 03

  It depends on who you talk to. Depends. Some are very pissed. Some feel naturally very, very betrayed and abandoned because it's not the first time that America has done something like this to the people in Afghanistan. America abandoned the people in Afghanistan after the Cold War. You know, 2 million Afghans died in that war. That was not a Cold War between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union.

• 44:50Speaker 03

  You know, Afghans made so much sacrifices in that war for freedom. But, once the war was over, America abandoned Afghanistan. In 2001, in 1996, when the Taliban came to power, there was many things America could do. America betrayed Afghanistan, abandoned it. 2001, after we went in there, we didn't give the Afghan people what they wanted, a decentralized system of governance. Instead, we gave them Mr. Hamid Karzai. We gave them Ashraf Ghani. We gave them, during the Bund conference, we gave them what we thought was good for Afghans.

• 45:31Speaker 03

  What America thought, what Salma Khalilzat thought was good for Afghans, we gave them that. And now in 2020, 2021, after, so between 2001 and 2021, the evacuations, do you know how many Afghan soldiers laid down their lives, made the ultimate sacrifice? Half of the Afghan army were killed by the Taliban between that time, 2001 to 2021, half the Afghan army. And then Mr. Joe Biden decides to abandon them. And you know what he said when he was doing this? He said, "We, America, gave them everything we could.

• 46:12Speaker 03

  One thing we could not give them was the will to fight. We gave them everything we could, we could not give them the will to fight." You know, the people in Afghanistan were fighting the Taliban and al-Qaeda long before Joe Biden even knew what al-Qaeda and Taliban was. I doubt he still knows what Taliban and al-Qaeda are. Because if he did, he would not be calling them good Taliban. He would not be saying from the White House podium that America is working with the Taliban. This is chaos, Sean. I know it is.

• 46:53Speaker 03

  And it's happening before everyone's eyes, and people are not even noticing it. So during the evacuations, what became known as the Abbey Gate bombing, a few days before this, the National Resistance Front, the resistance that had already been declared, members of the Afghan government, intelligence commandos were there. They received reports and they notified the US that the Taliban will carry out suicide bombings at the airport. And this is the only way the Taliban will be able to take control of the airport.

• 47:36Speaker 03

  And push America out. And they may blame it on Al Qaeda, ISIS, or any of their other buddies. But there were warnings coming from the resistance that the Taliban were planning suicide bombings. Now, thirteen service members died in that attack. That's not going to change. We cannot bring them back to life. It's a tragedy what happened. Many, many American soldiers were wounded. Sergeant Tyler Vargas-Andrews, look at that kid. Look at what happened to him. About 200 Afghans were also killed.

• 48:10Shawn Ryan?

  For those that don't know, he's lost a leg, he's lost his arm.

• 48:14Speaker 03

  And an arm, yeah.

• 48:15Shawn Ryan?

  He's lost all his friends.

• 48:17Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 48:20Shawn Ryan?

  So entire life is different now.

• 48:21Speaker 03

  It is.

• 48:22Shawn Ryan?

  Completely.

• 48:25Speaker 03

  But they say ISIS did this attack. They were so quick to say ISIS carried out this Abbey Gate bombing attack. It may be right, it may be wrong, but why are you not talking about the fact that Taliban had a thousand suicide bombers positioned all over H Kaya? 1,000 suicide bombers. Their commander was Hadi, Taliban commander named Hadi. He's with the Haqqani network. Haqqani, Sirajuddin Haqqani, his nickname is the father of suicide bombers. He was 10 minutes away from the airport.

• 49:04Speaker 03

  You were, we, the Biden administration were very quick into saying, this is based on intelligence. Our intelligence, this is ISIS that did this attack. Now, it's the same intelligence that Mr. Biden received in order to, it's the same intelligence. After the Abbey Gate bombing, he ordered a strike against the mastermind of that ISIS attack. And the same individuals who told him this is an ISIS attack also told him the mastermind is right there in Kabul, he's planning more attacks. So Mr. Biden orders a drone strike against that vehicle carrying the ISIS mastermind. And Everyone in that vehicle dies.

• 49:49Speaker 03

  General Mark Milley at the Pentagon, he said, we can confirm that this was ISIS, this was the ISIS mastermind. And he was on his way to carry out more terror attacks, more IED attacks. And how we know this is because of the secondary explosions. There were journalists in Afghanistan, and some of them decided to go and investigate this, the aftermath of that attack. It turned out that that supposed, that mastermind of ISIS mastermind was an aid worker.

• 50:24Shawn Ryan?

  I remember this.

• 50:26Speaker 03

  The people in the backseat, seven children, innocent children. What they called the secondary explosions were water bottles, water splashing everywhere. So that was the intelligence. That's how wrong the intelligence was at that time. And yet, they were so quick into saying, this is an ISIS terrorist attack.

• 50:48Shawn Ryan?

  Did we even have any intelligence in that country at that time? Or had everybody, had everybody moved into, into the airport?

• 51:00Speaker 03

  Mr. Biden and his State Department were relying on the Taliban for intelligence.

• 51:06Shawn Ryan?

  So, so, so the US, hold on. So the US's intelligence in Afghanistan at that time was coming from the Taliban? A terrorist organization?

• 51:21Speaker 03

  I don't say this. The State Department says this. Mr. Thomas West, the current US Special Envoy to Afghanistan, says this, that he, at the airport, was working with the Taliban, relying on the Taliban. The US, it was losing, we were losing the intelligence collection capability in Afghanistan as this thing was happening. And today, two and a half years after all of this, America has lost 98% of its collection capability in Afghanistan.

• 51:56Shawn Ryan?

  Ninety-eight percent.

• 51:57Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 51:58Shawn Ryan?

  So we have virtually zero intelligence on the ground in Afghanistan, which is essentially breeding ground for how many terrorist organizations?

• 52:09Speaker 03

  Twenty-seven terrorist organizations and growing every day.

• 52:12Shawn Ryan?

  Where do you get your intelligence from?

• 52:15Speaker 03

  So the National Resistance Front, the last democratic forces in Afghanistan, led by His Excellency Commander Ahmad Masood. It's a resistance. It has a battlefield wing, battlefield headquarters. It has an intelligence wing, a political wing. The best intelligence, the most reliable, accurate intelligence, comes from the National Resistance Front. No one has anything close to it. There is no one else. It's only the resistance versus twenty-seven different terrorist organizations.

• 52:55Shawn Ryan?

  How are you involved in the resistance?

• 52:58Speaker 03

  I am a member of the N R F. I lead the organization Vets for N R F, which is a U.S. veteran organization that gives voice and supports the last democratic forces in Afghanistan, led by Commander Masood. We're all in support of him. We support them, the N R F, in the continuation of the war against terrorism. We believe, as veteran, I believe this war has not ended. And the resistance on the ground, they don't think this war has ended. They see that this war has not ended. On a daily basis, they're carrying out operations against al-Qaeda, ISIS, Taliban, Haqqani,

• 53:43Speaker 03

  and all of these other terror networks. And in fact, I have brought a... List of all the recent operations for you. I'll give that to you in the month of March. And you will see dates, time, location, how many Taliban terrorists were killed, how many al-Qaeda were killed. And this is continuing. The resistance is continuing against them.

• 54:04Shawn Ryan?

  What kind of equipment does the resistance have?

• 54:08Speaker 03

  Everything that they had been assigned by the Afghan government. So the bulk of the NRF is Afghan commandos, KKA, the Qatari Khos, and intelligence officers from NDS, regular Afghan army, and then volunteers from Afghanistan. So their equipment is a mixture of weapons from, and this is not a lot, a few from the last resistance against the Taliban from 1996. And then they have some of those weapons that those soldiers were able to bring with them as the country was, province was falling to the Taliban and they were coming into Panjshir. They started bringing in some of their vehicles,

• 54:53Speaker 03

  ammo, M4s, M16s, heavy weapons. They brought all of them to Panjshir. But it's not enough.

• 55:03Shawn Ryan?

  What happened to all of the equipment, the weapons, the vehicles, the ammunition, the night vision

• 55:12Shawn Ryan?

  that the US had their stockpiled that we were using for the past 20 years? What happened to all that?

• 55:20Speaker 03

  The Taliban have all of them.

• 55:23Speaker 03

  And it's not just the Taliban. The Taliban, we're talking about $86 billion worth of bases, equipment, military equipment, and the items that you mentioned. All were left for the Taliban. And the Taliban are very generous with their brother in al-Qaeda and ISIS. And so ISIS has those weapons. Al-Qaeda has them. Hamas has them. Haqqani has them. Pakistani Taliban, Tahrir Taliban, they have them. Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, Kashmiri jihadists in Afghanistan have them. Ansarullah, Tajikistan is in Afghanistan. They have weapons. The Taliban have given those weapons to everyone. Those weapons that America left behind,

• 56:07Speaker 03

  they're even found in places like Yemen. They're found in North Africa. They're found in the current conflict between Israel and Hamas.

• 56:23Speaker 03

  All of these weapons were left behind. This is basically the, the way I look at it, it's the last gift-wrapped item that Mr. Biden left for the Taliban. And they're using that against the Afghan people. And once again, I'll say it once again. Once they're done with the Afghan people, they're going to continue marching west.

• 56:52Shawn Ryan?

  We'll get into that. On that note, let's take a quick break.

• 56:58Speaker 00

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• 57:28Shawn Ryan?

  I want to tell you about this business venture I've been on for about the past seven, eight months. And it's finally come to fruition. I've been hell-bent on finding the cleanest functional mushroom supplement on the planet. And that all kind of stemmed from the psychedelic treatment I did. Came out of it, got a ton of benefits. Haven't had a drop of alcohol in almost two years. I'm more in the moment with my family. And that led me down researching the benefits of just everyday functional mushrooms. And I started taking some supplements. I found some coffee replacements. I even wrapped a brand. And, you know, it got to the point where I just wanted the finest ingredients available,

• 58:12Shawn Ryan?

  no matter where they come from. And it, it, it got to this point where I was just going to start my own brand. And so we started going to trade shows and, and looking for the finest ingredients. And, and doing that, I ran into this guy. Maybe you've heard of him. His name's Laird Hamilton. And his wife Gabby Reese, and they have an entire line of supplements with all the finest ingredients. And we got to talking, turns out, they have the perfect functional mushroom supplement. It's actually called Performance Mushrooms.

• 58:53Shawn Ryan?

  And this has everything. It's USDA organic. It's got chaga, cordyceps, lion's mane, miyataki. This stuff is amazing for energy balance, for cognition. Look, just being honest, I see a lot of people taking care of their bodies. I do not see a lot of people taking care of their brain. This is the product, guys. And so, we got to talking, and our values seemed very aligned. We're both into the functional mushrooms. And after a lot of back and forth, I am now a shareholder in the company.

• 59:34Shawn Ryan?

  I have a small amount of ownership, and I'm just, look, I'm just really proud to be repping and be a part of the company that's making the best functional mushroom supplement on the planet. You can get this stuff at layered superfoods.com. You can use the promo code SRS. That'll get you 20% off these Performance Mushrooms, or anything in the store. They got a ton of good stuff. Once again, that's layered superfoods.com. Use the promo code SRS. That gets you 20% off. You guys are gonna love this stuff. I guarantee it.

• 1:00:19Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you for listening to the Sean Ryan Show. If you haven't already, please take a minute, head over to iTunes and leave the Sean Ryan Show a review. We read every review that comes through, and we really appreciate the support. Thank you. Let's get back to the show.

• 1:00:40Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Legend, we're back from the break. We still have a lot to cover. I want to talk about Taliban-China relations before we get into the money train that America is sending to the Taliban of, what is it, 40 million a week or something? But we'll get into that. But I want to talk about how China's involvement, when it started. It was, to my understanding, that negotiations between China and the Taliban actually started before August 31, 21. Is that true?

• 1:01:15Speaker 03

  That is true.

• 1:01:16Shawn Ryan?

  With the livium?

• 1:01:17Speaker 03

  That is true.

• 1:01:18Shawn Ryan?

  When did that start?

• 1:01:19Speaker 03

  So the relationship between China and Taliban started when we were there, the peak of fighting. China started supporting the Taliban, giving weapons and funding to the Taliban in order to put pressure on America to get out.

• 1:01:34Shawn Ryan?

  What year did that start? How long before the withdrawal?

• 1:01:37Speaker 03

  Well, you see, talking about China, you're talking about a very powerful country who doesn't leave evidence behind. Not that easy. So it's hard to pinpoint it, but you could say this thing started around 2006, 2007, maybe 2005.

• 1:01:54Shawn Ryan?

  That early?

• 1:01:55Speaker 03

  And the Taliban started their operations against America.

• 1:01:58Shawn Ryan?

  When did you start noticing Chinese officials just blatantly negotiating with Taliban in Kabul?

• 1:02:10Speaker 03

  You see that happening after the evacuation. So I'll tell you this. So President Biden ordered the withdrawal, and it took place on August 31, 21. Two days later, on September 2, a plane took off from China, landed in Bagram Airfield in Parwan Province, large, huge military installation built originally by the Russians when they had invaded Afghanistan. And then it's such a strategic and important location, that was the US's headquarters. And during this entire time that we were there, America was there. And so billions of dollars have been spent on this Bagram Airfield. It has a 12,000-foot runway.

• 1:02:57Speaker 03

  One of the busiest air uh uh runways during the war. Anywhere in the world was Bagram Airfield. Bagram is so huge, um I don't know if you have ever been there. But it, yeah, as you know, it can house fifteen, twenty thousand personnel. It's a huge base. There were, there are restaurants, shops, everything is inside that base. It's a very modern city inside Afghanistan. And so this plane from China landed in Bagram Airfield, carrying about a hundred fifty Chinese nationals. And they immediately started giving life back to Bagram. So when the US had left a few months ago, left Bagram, not Afghanistan, just Bagram, abandoned it.

• 1:03:39Speaker 03

  The Taliban, who were under Safi Mountains around Bagram, came in and to some extent destroyed Bagram. And then, as the evacuations were happening, the Taliban decided to release all the prisoners, al-Qaeda and ISIS that were also in Bagram. So those prisoners started damaging the base. And so, two days after the withdrawal, September two, two thousand twenty-one, this plane carrying a hundred fifty Chinese, it landed in Bagram, and it started rebuilding it. Within about two weeks, more planes from China landed in Bagram Airfield. And since then, there has been a consistent amount of approximately three hundred fifty Chinese nationals in Bagram.

• 1:04:24Speaker 03

  And they never leave. They have no reason to leave.

• 1:04:27Shawn Ryan?

  So would you say September of twenty-one is the first time that the Chinese overtly showed presence in Afghanistan?

• 1:04:35Speaker 03

  September two.

• 1:04:36Shawn Ryan?

  September two.

• 1:04:37Speaker 03

  Two days after we left.

• 1:04:38Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I meant September of twenty twenty-one.

• 1:04:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, and that's not all, though. It's worse than that. China is helping the Taliban build a military division. China's, uh, there's a defense company in China called Norenko. It's a big defense company, a weapons manufacturer. They have held so many meetings with the Taliban's Defense Ministry. Now, the Taliban's Defense Minister is Mullah Yakub, son of the founder of the Taliban. Mullah Omar's son today is the Defense Minister in Afghanistan. He has held many meetings with Norenko, and so have other Taliban officials. And so Norenko is known as a company that gives arms,

• 1:05:25Speaker 03

  military equipment, surveillance equipment, in exchange for minerals. These are called arms-for-minerals deals. And so they come, they have been giving the Taliban, uh, uh, new technology. Huawei, a Chinese company, uh, through Norenko has built, has installed over a hundred thousand cameras in Kabul alone, and also in elsewhere, in strategic places in Afghanistan. They have given the Taliban a state-of-the-art surveillance system.

• 1:05:56Shawn Ryan?

  Did you just say a hundred thousand?

• 1:05:58Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:05:59Shawn Ryan?

  Cameras?

• 1:05:59Speaker 03

  In Kabul.

• 1:06:00Shawn Ryan?

  Is this these AI-type cameras that, with facial recognition?

• 1:06:06Speaker 03

  A surveillance system. They have it in China, they're giving the same thing to the Taliban. And that's not even it. The Chinese are involved, and they have signed with the Taliban billions of dollars' worth of contracts to extract minerals from Afghanistan. All of these are illegal mining extractions. And so the Chinese are, uh, have, uh, are involved in extracting lithium. And Afghanistan is the world's largest. It has the world's largest deposit of lithium. And so it's lithium. Chinese are extracting gold, other rare earth minerals in Afghanistan, copper.

• 1:06:47Shawn Ryan?

  For those that don't know, lithium is what all of the batteries are made out of. That you hear about the green initiative that that people are pushing. That's the interest. So here in the US, Chinese are producing all of our green initiative power supplies by basically infiltrating Afghanistan and creating these minerals for weapons deals with the Taliban.

• 1:07:19Speaker 03

  Absolutely. In fact, that phone in your pocket right now, that has a lithium battery. And so when China extracts all of this lithium, who are they going to sell it to?

• 1:07:28Shawn Ryan?

  Back to the US.

• 1:07:29Speaker 03

  Back to the United States. Yes. And it's not even the end. The Taliban, the Taliban sent one of their commanders, a terrorist, to China who met with the president of China, Xi Jinping. And the Chinese president accepted his credentials and handed over to him the embassy of Afghanistan in China. Similarly, the Taliban and Chinese have sent their own ambassadors to Kabul, who has been recognized by the leader of the Taliban. They have, short of that official, officially the president of that country, that Communist Party saying, "I have recognized the Taliban," short of that statement, there is relationships

• 1:08:13Speaker 03

  on so many levels, military, political, business, between China and the Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Chinese are building warehouses in Afghanistan in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of nowhere. So as an investor from America, as an honest businessman, you wouldn't go and spend $500 in that place. It's in the middle of nowhere, but not China. This is all part of that Rodent Belt Initiative of China, trillion-dollar worth of project, a huge project that intends to connect all of Asia to Europe. So China has long-term goals. And now you want to know what the US is doing to counter China? Nothing.

• 1:08:57Shawn Ryan?

  Nothing.

• 1:08:58Speaker 03

  Yeah. State Department say they're doing nothing.

• 1:09:03Shawn Ryan?

  Is China, is China helping the Taliban build infrastructure within the major cities and provinces as well? I know they're doing a lot of that in Africa. Or is it solely weapons for minerals?

• 1:09:21Speaker 03

  So they are building infrastructures, like I said. Now again, it's really hard to tell without, I mean, like I said.

• 1:09:29Shawn Ryan?

  Road systems.

• 1:09:30Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:09:31Shawn Ryan?

  Buildings. I'm not just talking about the mining camps.

• 1:09:34Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Everything that is required to connect all of Central Asia to Europe, all of it. Everything that is required, warehouses, roads, China is investing, they're building it. For the Taliban, to help the Taliban, because not, this not only helps the Taliban, it's, you can say this, China doesn't really care about the Taliban. China has bigger plans than Taliban. Taliban is a useful idiot to China. They're using it.

• 1:10:03Speaker 03

  But it is happening right now. Like I said, what worries me the most is that China's intention is not just Afghanistan, it's bigger than that, way bigger than that. It's America, and America has done nothing in Afghanistan to counter even that part of this, the Chinese part of it.

• 1:10:22Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:24Shawn Ryan?

  Very troubling. Let's talk about, I mean, it's smart on their part.

• 1:10:32Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:10:32Shawn Ryan?

  Very smart. Let's talk about how the US is funding Taliban.

• 1:10:39Speaker 03

  Oh, that's a hard statement to say, right? Yes.

• 1:10:43Shawn Ryan?

  It is.

• 1:10:45Speaker 03

  So briefly, I'll tell you this. There is, when this evacuation was happening, the Afghan people had about $7 billion of their money in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York for safekeeping.

• 1:11:03Speaker 03

  After the evacuations, President Biden decided to cut this money in two, send $3.5 billion to Switzerland.

• 1:11:14Speaker 03

  He said the reason he did this was because the survivors and the family members of the victims of the terrorist attack of 9/11, their lawyers were trying to get a portion of this money. Because now the Taliban were in power, in Kabul. And because the Taliban had a role in 9/11 by giving safe haven to Bin Laden and support to Bin Laden, well, then they can sue the Taliban now. But the way the rest of us saw this is America is a system, there are courts, there are laws. It's not easy for somebody to take, for one victim to just take money from another victim.

• 1:11:58Speaker 03

  You know, it's not the right thing to do, and it will not happen in any court. So the money was safe, right here. That money being here in the United States meant that money would not go to terrorists in control of Afghanistan. But what Mr. Biden did is he cut it in two, kept 3.5 billion here in the US, and then transferred the other 3.5 billion dollars to Switzerland in a bank account that is called the Afghan Trust Fund. Now, he assigned one individual from the State Department on the board, one individual from the Switzerland government is on the board, and then there are two Afghans.

• 1:12:43Speaker 03

  One of those Afghans is an Afghan-American. His name is Shah Meirabi. Now Shah Meirabi, his job, the whole point of this trust fund is to make sure that this money benefits the Afghan people, not the Taliban. Now Shah Meirabi is a board member of the Afghan Trust Fund. At the same time, he's a board member currently serving, he's a member of the Taliban Supreme Council at the central bank, at the Taliban-controlled central bank. The other individual, Anwar Ahadi, he is... He's a very weird man. He believes in one-party rule in Afghanistan,

• 1:13:28Speaker 03

  where he thinks only one tribe in Afghanistan has the authority to rule in Afghanistan. He's what, in some ways you could say he's very racist. But this other individual, Anwar Ahadi, he used to work for the Taliban during the first Taliban reign. Now he's in charge of the 3.5 billion dollars. And this 3.5 billion dollars, it has been accumulating, generating interest. It's been there for over 2.5 years. It has generated about 200 million dollars in interest. Now, what is their plan? What they have or are doing with that interest money?

• 1:14:09Speaker 03

  Some of that is used to...

• 1:14:13Speaker 03

  I'll back up a little bit. Afghanistan's money is not printed in Afghanistan. It's printed in Poland and in France. Okay? Now, there is cost associated with printing, with printing currency, Afghan currency. And so they have offered to pay for the printing cost of that fund, that money, unlimited amount of money that will go to the Taliban-controlled central bank. Another way they have offered, they have offered to give, pay for the booklets, the passport booklets. Afghan passports, the booklets are not printed in Afghanistan. They're also printed in Europe.

• 1:14:58Speaker 03

  Now, there's a cost associated with that. They have offered to pay for that. Now, once those passport booklets, millions and millions of them are printed, they're shipped to Afghanistan and given to, none other than Sirajuddin Haqqani, his passport department. And then he issues it every Thursday, Holy Warrior Day, at the passport department. He gives it to them, generating more money.

• 1:15:26Shawn Ryan?

  Is this negligence? Or is this on purpose?

• 1:15:33Speaker 03

  Knowing that Mr. Biden is very familiar, the Secretary of State Antony Blinken is very familiar with one of the board members and his wife from the time when Mr. Joe Biden was Chairman Joe Biden of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Now, the wife of that board member, Anwar Ahadi, is none other than Fatima Gheilani. Fatima Gheilani is a very interesting woman. If you just Google her name, you will be surprised with the things she has to say that support the Taliban, her pro-Taliban statements.

• 1:16:16Speaker 03

  She has known Mr. Joe Biden since 2001, right after the 9/11 attacks. In fact, Joe Biden very heavily relied on the advice of Fatima Gheilani while he was Senate Foreign Relations Committee making decisions that would affect the future of Afghanistan. There are a number of key individuals in this whole thing, from going back to the first, the resistance against the Soviet Union. Those same individuals were there when 9/11 happened. They were there when America was about to go at war.

• 1:16:58Speaker 03

  They were, they had a very important role in the, in propping up Hamid Karzai to be the president. They were friends with Ashraf Ghani. They in fact had roles in the Afghan government. And then during the evacuations, these same individuals were involved. And now, when the Taliban are back in power, those same individuals are the decision makers. Anwar Ahadi, Shawn Rabi, Fatima Gheilani, Zalmai Chailzad.

• 1:17:30Speaker 03

  Someone needs to look into all of these individuals.

• 1:17:34Speaker 03

  They're not unknown. Zalmay Khalivzat, he was investigated by the FBI for money laundering.

• 1:17:46Speaker 03

  While he was the US ambassador for Afghanistan.

• 1:17:54Speaker 03

  So this isn't negligence? It's by design. It looks that way, from my point of view. I don't see how you could see it any other way.

• 1:18:07Speaker 03

  I agree.

• 1:18:09Speaker 03

  But then again, it's all up to the American people. I, what I can do through The Sean Ryan Show, through your platform, is give the people, this people that I love so much, give them this information. It's their government.

• 1:18:27Speaker 03

  Now, what you do at this point, after you have investigated these matters, that's the only thing that matters.

• 1:18:35Speaker 03

  You have that right to put that man in the White House, and you did. Now you have that right to take him out of the White House and put him back in his basement. Now I, I'm only speaking as an American veteran now. I have to be careful.

• 1:18:54Speaker 03

  I will,

• 1:18:57Speaker 03

  it will be against every value that I have as an Afghan, as an American veteran, values that I was taught in the army.

• 1:19:07Speaker 03

  I will not call myself a man if I vote for this man, for Joe Biden.

• 1:19:15Speaker 03

  I will be betraying every value that I have if I vote for this man. I know if I, if Mr. Biden wins this election, the Taliban will stay in power for another four years. There's a good chance the Taliban will stay in power for another four years.

• 1:19:35Speaker 03

  Mr. Joe Biden has had so many opportunities to correct this with just one phone call. He has not.

• 1:19:45Speaker 03

  He can pick up a phone today.

• 1:19:49Speaker 03

  Call Commander Masood. Call Mr. Amrul Asali, the acting president of Afghanistan. End this.

• 1:19:57Speaker 03

  He has not.

• 1:19:59Speaker 03

  And I don't think he will.

• 1:20:02Speaker 03

  And so

• 1:20:04Speaker 03

  I'm only going to talk to veterans at this point. Look, like, all of you guys went and you served in Afghanistan. And you sacrificed. And you did all of these things, which are appreciated by the Afghan people. Now, ask yourself. The question is not if the Afghan people, if we support, if we appreciate your sacrifices, because we do. And Commander Masood has said this on Scott Mann's podcast. He's very grateful to the American veterans for their sacrifices. Ask if your commander in chief, if the current commander in chief appreciates your sacrifices.

• 1:20:40Speaker 03

  And then decide based on that. Decide whether you want to vote for this man. Once again.

• 1:20:49Shawn Ryan?

  That's a damn good point.

• 1:20:51Speaker 03

  Look, and

• 1:20:55Speaker 03

  the simplest way I could say it, right here, right now. American taxpayer money, your tax dollars, are funding the Taliban right now. And this has been going on since September 2021. On a weekly basis, the United States, the current administration, Mr. Joe Biden, has been sending $40 million. Not from his own checking account. It's the US payers, Americans' tax dollars. He's sending them $40 million cash every week. That ends up in Afghanistan. And it's a very complex system. The money goes to the Afghanistan International Bank,

• 1:21:40Speaker 03

  that lacks any authority to convert this dollar to Afghani, to auction it. Right? And so this money, AIB, gives it to the Taliban-controlled Central Bank of Afghanistan. When I say Central Bank, think Federal Reserve. So the money goes there. Now, who is in charge of Afghanistan's central bank right now? Nur Ahmad Agha, sanctioned terrorist, sanctioned by the United States for financing IED attacks against our soldiers that killed American soldiers. He runs the central bank. He gets $40 million every week. Now, once the money reaches the central bank, they hold what is called a bidding and auctioning session,

• 1:22:24Speaker 03

  where they invite individuals that are involved with the Hawala system, licensed money dealers. They invite them. And they're bidding. Everyone bids on who wants to buy this dollar and for how much. Now, the ones they invite are all individuals affiliated with the senior leadership of the Taliban or with the Haqqani network. They invite these individuals. And since 2021, consistently, the winner every week is individuals linked to the Haqqani network. They get the money. They auction it. They convert it to Afghani, and Haqqani gets a portion. And then this money, the remaining,

• 1:23:06Speaker 03

  is given to what is called NGOs, local implementing partners in Afghanistan. Now, these NGOs that are in Afghanistan, about 900 or so, all of them came into existence after America left. These are all NGOs that their licenses were issued to them by the Taliban. So basically, what I'm saying is this. If you go to Afghanistan today to help our Afghan allies, our friends, and you want to open up an NGO, the Taliban will not give you a license. You're Sean Ryan. Are these NGOs also Chinese mining camps?

• 1:23:47Speaker 03

  I'm not sure. I'm not sure.

• 1:23:48Shawn Ryan?

  Could it be possible that the US is not only funding Taliban, but also Chinese mining camps?

• 1:23:55Speaker 03

  I am not sure.

• 1:23:55Shawn Ryan?

  Is that a possibility?

• 1:23:57Speaker 03

  Everything is possible in Afghanistan right now.

• 1:23:59Shawn Ryan?

  It's an NGO.

• 1:24:00Speaker 03

  But these NGOs, they're all affiliates of the Taliban. Their licenses were given to them by the Taliban, and the Taliban will not give you a license, will not give me a license. They only give their own supporters licenses. So now this money reaches these NGOs. And from there, it's not even the end of story at that point. These NGOs, they either give a cut directly to the Taliban, or they distribute the aid in areas where there are Taliban fighters, suicide bombers, would-be suicide bombers, and suicide bombers who are already in hell. Their families get aid. And so, US taxpayer money right now is funding the Taliban. Now, your viewers may be shocked, and they may say, "Oh, Legend is lying.

• 1:24:43Speaker 03

  It can't be possible that I am with the resistance, so I may be biased. I'm trying to help the resistance." Don't take my words for it. Listen to John Sapo, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. He's neither painshiri. John Sapo is not a member of the Taliban. He's certainly not a member of the NRF. His office came into existence because Congress mandated his office. He reports directly to the United States Congress, not to the administration. John Sapo testified before the United States Congress and said, "I cannot assure the American people that their tax dollars are not funding the Taliban." Listen to him.

• 1:25:26Speaker 03

  It is happening right now. And it's like I said, it's your tax dollars. It's your tax dollars going to the very individuals who killed hundreds and thousands of American soldiers, injured so many Americans, killed hundreds of thousands of Afghans. And right now, they're hosting al-Qaeda and ISIS and everyone else who are planning to attack you again. And you're funding it. I'll tell you this. The situation is so bad.

• 1:25:55Speaker 03

  Back during the first reign of the Taliban, we used to say, the resistance used to say, if Pakistan, Pakistan used to be the main supporter, a financial supporter of the Taliban back then. And the Afghans used to say, if Pakistan stopped supporting the Taliban, the Taliban will crumble in one year. Today, I'm telling you, if America stops supporting the Taliban, stops sending 40 million to the Taliban, you will see the Taliban crumbling in under a year. The Taliban is a dying regime. The only thing that's keeping it alive at the moment, since 2021, is this $40 million injection that the US keeps giving, putting in the arms of this dying Taliban every week. It's that bad.

• 1:26:40Shawn Ryan?

  What about China?

• 1:26:42Speaker 03

  We already discussed that China has...

• 1:26:44Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, they're also helping.

• 1:26:45Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, but...

• 1:26:48Shawn Ryan?

  What is the... What are the regular Afghan... What are the regular Afghan people of the Chinese coming in? What do they think of that? In helping the Taliban? And if they are building infrastructure, that does improve the country? Are they pro-Chinese?

• 1:27:07Speaker 03

  You said a few things. First, they're not building anything for Afghans. They're building stuff for that Red Road and Belt Initiative and surveillance system which helps the Taliban. China is not there helping your Afghan ally. They're helping the Taliban. Everything they're doing either helps China's Road and Belt Initiative or it helps the Taliban.

• 1:27:27Shawn Ryan?

  Do they realize that?

• 1:27:28Speaker 03

  The Afghan people? Of course they realize it. But you're talking about a poor oppressed people who the moment they say something, in an hour, the Taliban will execute them. There is no freedom of speech in Afghanistan. What I have said to you right now, if I had to say 2% of this publicly in Afghanistan, I would be executed by now. Yes. So the Afghans, they don't have a voice here. Now, we are their voice. You are their voice. You can be their voice. And this is something that can be stopped right now. This cash could be stopped right now. It just takes one phone call from the president. But it's not happening.

• 1:28:11Shawn Ryan?

  Do you have anything more to say on Pakistan-Taliban relations?

• 1:28:17Speaker 03

  Oh, yes, a lot.

• 1:28:20Shawn Ryan?

  Let's go into that.

• 1:28:22Speaker 03

  I'll tell you this, Shaw. What the veterans don't realize, veterans actually do realize this, it's the American people that don't realize it. The amount of pain Pakistan has inflicted upon America

• 1:28:38Speaker 03

  has never happened before.

• 1:28:42Speaker 03

  Behind all of the problems that America had in that region and still faces, all the threats, is the hand of the Pakistani government, the general headquarters, and the Pakistani ISI, their CIA, Pakistani CIA, basically. Look at what the Pakistanis did, how they harbored the Taliban and Bin Laden when we went in. So, going back to 2001 now. All the Taliban commanders went into Pakistan. They were given safe haven in Quetta and Peshawar and Islamabad, protected by the Pakistanis. They held weddings in Pakistan, out in the public. The Pakistanis knew about it, they didn't do anything.

• 1:29:26Speaker 03

  Now, 2003, 2004, when the Taliban started coming back to Afghanistan to carry out attacks, who funded them? The Pakistanis. All of the veterans listening to this, they know what I'm talking about when I say IED attacks in Afghanistan. They all faced it. Where did the ammonium nitrate for those IEDs come from? Afghanistan does not produce ammonium nitrate. In fact, ammonium nitrate has been banned in Afghanistan since the days of the king. And ammonium nitrate is the main component in that IED. Where did it come from? It didn't come from Mars, it didn't land in Afghanistan, somebody gave that to the Taliban. Now investigate that.

• 1:30:12Speaker 00

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• 1:31:12Speaker 03

  Pakistan produces ammonium nitrate. And it was a... Everyone knew this. No one did anything about it. Everyone knew that Pakistani ISI and their army was giving ammonium nitrate to the dealers in Pakistan, and they were shipping it across the border to Afghanistan, which were used in killing American soldiers. Look at Congressman Brian Mast of Florida. If you ever go in Congress and you see him, you will quickly realize that the guy is a wounded veteran. He used to be Staff Sergeant Brian Mast. Now he's congressman. He doesn't have legs. What happened to his legs? He was deployed to Afghanistan. He served in Helmand and Kandahar. There was an IED attack.

• 1:31:57Speaker 03

  He lost his legs. Where did the ammonium nitrate come from? Back then, he was Staff Sergeant Brian Mast. He didn't have authority to do anything about it. Now he's Congressman Brian Mast. He's in a position to get the answers. For all the other veterans, for me, for you, for himself, where did that ammonium nitrate come from? Talk about the August 27th attack, Abbey Gate bombing. Where did the ammonium nitrate come from? That, look at Tyler Vargas Andrews and his condition, right? We spoke about him earlier. Where did that ammonium nitrate come from? Pakistan. While Pakistanis were doing this, you know what the US government was doing?

• 1:32:41Speaker 03

  Under President Bush, to some extent, a lot under President Obama. The US government gave upwards of $70 billion to the Pakistani military and ISI. While they were funding the Taliban, while they were hosting Bin Laden, while the Taliban were carrying out attacks against American soldiers. American government was giving money to the Pakistanis for counterterrorism purposes, they called it. Do you know where Bin Laden was found? Outside of Pakistan's West Point. Pakistan's West Point. They were hosting him.

• 1:33:24Speaker 03

  That same year, that SEALs, you guys went and killed Bin Laden. That same year, Pakistan was given about $3 billion for counterterrorism purposes. And they used that same money and they gave it to the Taliban and it ended up in Afghanistan in form of ammunition and ammonium nitrate and it killed American soldiers.

• 1:33:49Speaker 03

  There is so much that the Pakistani government has done. It's just unimaginable, the amount of pain that they have caused. Those Gold Star families, those wounded veterans, 50,000 wounded veterans from the Afghan War. About 70% of all the casualties, 60% of all the casualties are casualties, American casualties in Afghanistan or as a result of IED. If you go to Arlington National Cemetery and look for the graves of 100 American soldiers from the Afghan War, out of those 160 of them died as a result of ammonium nitrate,

• 1:34:33Speaker 03

  as a result of ammonium nitrate that was given to the Taliban by the Pakistani ISI. No one is talking about it.

• 1:34:46Shawn Ryan?

  Well, there will be now.

• 1:34:48Speaker 03

  I hope so.

• 1:34:50Shawn Ryan?

  Does Iran tie into this at all?

• 1:34:56Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:34:58Shawn Ryan?

  How so?

• 1:34:59Speaker 03

  To some extent. Well, the reason Pakistan supported Taliban were for different reasons, ideological reasons. The reason Iranians, to certain extent, and I'll give you a bit background. During the first reign of the Taliban, when the Taliban had first come to power in 1996, Iran used to support the resistance to fight against the Taliban. They had no links with the Taliban. Iran, in fact, back then, almost went to war. They had their forces at the border and were about to go and destroy the Taliban regime. You know who stopped it? The United Nations. But Iran, at that point, was supporting the

• 1:35:42Speaker 03

  resistance. The reason certain factions along the border of Iran started supporting the Taliban while we were there was to put pressure on America to leave. Now, keep in mind, America was in Iraq, America was in Afghanistan, Iran is right in the middle. I don't agree with what the Iranians did, the government of Iran did, as far as supporting the Taliban while we were there, but their reason was not the same as the reason of the Pakistanis. Iran wanted America out of the picture, and I think they made a mistake because they didn't think about the second-order effect of their decision. So they gave money to

• 1:36:22Speaker 03

  the Taliban, not a lot, some, and they used to put pressure on the US to leave, and we left. And now Iran is left with the Taliban.

• 1:36:33Speaker 03

  And so they cannot stop the support for the Taliban all of a sudden. And they certainly don't want to give any funding to the Taliban. So they're stuck. They don't know what to do. America left, Taliban are there. And they pose a threat to everyone, the Iranians, the Pakistanis. There are suicide bombings inside Pakistan. On a daily basis, the Taliban attack Pakistanis and they kill Pakistani soldiers. On a daily basis. Pakistan raised a snake, it fed a snake, hoping and thinking that this snake would only bite its neighbor to the West in Afghanistan. Now that snake

• 1:37:18Speaker 03

  has come to Pakistan. It's like chickens come home to roost, right? Now, America is making the same mistake that the Pakistanis made. Now, America is funding the Taliban, hoping that the Taliban will not go international. But oh, they will go international. It's coming, that next big attack against America is coming. That snake Mr. Biden is funding right now will turn around and bite us.

• 1:37:43Shawn Ryan?

  There's not a doubt in my mind. How do you envision that happening? Is it going to look like what just happened in Russia? A couple of weeks ago?

• 1:37:54Speaker 03

  That was a tragedy, right? What happened in Russia, ISIS attack. ISIS Khorasan claimed the responsibility. Will it look like that? Maybe. I'll tell you one thing that we discussed this on a podcast with Lieutenant Colonel Scott Mann, Commander Masood, and Congressman Walz. And I said it there, whatever the next big attack is against America, I don't know when it is coming. But I'll tell you this, it's going to make 9/11 look like a dress rehearsal. It's gonna make 9/11 look like a walk in the park. None of these guys, as Lieutenant Colonel Scott Mann says, none of these guys want to come in second place.

• 1:38:39Speaker 03

  If you look at their history and the attacks they have carried out against America, embassy, consulate generals, then moved on to USS Cole, then that first World Trade Bombing, and then the big 9/11. So it keeps increasing. So that next one, whatever it is, whenever it comes, it's gonna make that 9/11 attack look like a dress rehearsal.

• 1:39:04Speaker 03

  Is it going to be planes again going into buildings?

• 1:39:10Speaker 03

  We don't know. Maybe. Maybe it will be at the border, individuals coming from the southern border. Maybe there will be an attack at LAX Airport, at Ronald Reagan Airport. Maybe it will be multiple.

• 1:39:24Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, that's how I envision it happening. I envision lots and lots of incidents like what we just saw in Russia, all scattered throughout the United States. It puts a lot of fear into everyone.

• 1:39:41Speaker 03

  Lone wolf attacks.

• 1:39:44Speaker 03

  Small cells. Pressure cooker bomb, like the Boston Marathon bombing, that Pulse nightclub.

• 1:39:53Speaker 03

  Yes. Except plenty of them.

• 1:39:57Shawn Ryan?

  Do you have any idea how many terrorists have infiltrated the US up to this point?

• 1:40:06Speaker 03

  The CIA knows, the FBI knows. I'll tell you this. Since 2021 withdrawal, about 40 to 50 individuals on FBI's watch lists, on terror watch lists, have been apprehended at the southern border, trying to cross into the United States. Those were the ones that were caught out of the 8 million that tried to get in in this timeframe since Mr. Biden's administration started. Now, in that group of 40-something individuals, there are individuals, military-age males, with Afghan passports, passports that were issued to them after we left by none other than Sirajuddin Haqqani.

• 1:40:53Speaker 03

  And these are the guys, like I said, that were caught. How many getaways? Are they in Idaho? Are they in Wyoming, in Montana? I don't know. And these are not necessarily Afghans, people who were born in Afghanistan. Within a week, I can make you Mullah Sean Ryan. You just need money. Give it to Haqqani Network. Give it to Sarajidina Qani, and he's gonna make you Haji Sean Ryan, Mullah Sean Ryan. Give you a different date of birth. Give you a passport. Who controls the passport department in Afghanistan? Sarajidina Qani, wanted terrorist, wanted by the FBI, ten million dollar bounty on his head, wanted by the State Department, ten million bounty on his head. He controls the passport department.

• 1:41:38Speaker 03

  He's been issuing passports since 2021. In fact, I'll tell you this, and you may not know this.

• 1:41:47Speaker 03

  Every Thursday, since 2021 withdrawal, in Afghanistan is called Holy Warrior Day at the passport department, where the office is closed for the rest of the public. It's only open to holy warriors. Are you serious? Taliban highnesses, al-Qaida. I am not kidding. It's Holy Warrior Day. Do you know how much money Haqqani made, Sarajidina Haqqani and the Haqqani Network made, issuing passports since 2021? No. Forty million dollars in profits. He made another five million dollars issuing Afghan Taskera, ID cards, like driver license.

• 1:42:34Speaker 03

  Who controls Kabul Airport?

• 1:42:37Speaker 03

  Sarajidina Qani. Kabul? Let me add this. Correction. Kabul International Airport. Who controls it? Saraj Akhmani. Saraj Akhmani, think of Saraj Akhmani as this, and his role in the security of Kabul International Airport. He's the TSA of Kabul International Airport. We have TSA, you know. We have TSA all over, in every airport in the US. I mean, they have made life hell for travelers, for Americans. But they're there for a reason. They're looking for terrorists. In their mind, maybe the terrorists will come again and come through the airport, take a flight, and come here, and they will arrest them.

• 1:43:19Speaker 03

  So they're the last line of defense. No one is focused on, even in the case of 9/11, no one talks about how those individuals left wherever they came from, who gave them US visas. They didn't come illegally, they came with US visas. Somebody gave them US visas. Is anyone focused on that part of it? And now, just like we have a TSA here at LAX, at Nashville Airport. Who's keeping an eye on Kabul International Airport? The departure destination. You're focused on the landing destination, not on the departure destination. In fact, the departure destination is controlled by Saraj Zinnaqani. Am I making sense?

• 1:44:03Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:11Shawn Ryan?

  It's hard to believe, but you're making a lot of sense. I mean, it's, uh...

• 1:44:21Shawn Ryan?

  When do you think we'll start to see these attacks?

• 1:44:25Speaker 03

  If we compare the first reign of the Taliban to today and the presence of foreign terrorists in Afghanistan, in terms of timeline and history, I would say we're somewhere in 1999. Maybe a year, two year. Al Qaeda is in Afghanistan. ISIS is there, you're already seeing it. You've seen attack, suicide bombings in Iran. You've seen suicide bombings in Pakistan. You've seen suicide bombings in Moscow. There was an attempt to blow up, uh... if I'm not mistaken, your Swedish Parliament? By ISIS.

• 1:45:07Speaker 03

  It's already happening. There was a young man from the state of Maine. Not too long ago, he picked up a machete and started attacking New York cops because he was inspired by the Taliban. There are gangs in California who are receiving inspiration from the Taliban.

• 1:45:31Speaker 03

  They're talking about how they went to the pocket, how to have Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, and they're showing Taliban flags.

• 1:45:44Speaker 03

  They're talking about the repression of women carried out by the Taliban, but they don't see it as repression. This is Islamic, they say. This is part of Islam. You literally have American youth brainwashed by the Taliban right here.

• 1:46:02Speaker 03

  They think what happened in 2021 was a victory of the Taliban, a militarily victory of the Taliban, a military victory. They think the Taliban are glorious heroes.

• 1:46:15Speaker 03

  This is really what's happening right here.

• 1:46:19Shawn Ryan?

  What do you think they're waiting for? Why haven't they hit us yet?

• 1:46:27Speaker 03

  It's a long-term thing. And like I said, don't say they haven't already attempted. They have. Like I said, individuals on terror watch lists were apprehended.

• 1:46:38Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, it's impossible. With that many people coming across the border, it is impossible to keep tabs. I mean, they have no idea who's coming through.

• 1:46:47Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:46:47Shawn Ryan?

  None whatsoever. And so to be able to... They caught 50 out of how many? Did you say it was eight? Is it 16 million? I can't remember. The number changes.

• 1:46:56Speaker 03

  About 8 million getaways, I think.

• 1:46:57Shawn Ryan?

  Is it 8 million?

• 1:46:58Speaker 03

  About 8 million that are illegally.

• 1:47:00Shawn Ryan?

  So they caught 50?

• 1:47:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. And these are the 50 they have caught?

• 1:47:04Shawn Ryan?

  In a pool of 8 million people.

• 1:47:06Speaker 03

  I'll tell you this. In San Diego, in jail there, Border Patrol, honorable brave men and women, Border Patrol, they caught one about two weeks ago. And he's still in jail. It doesn't... That threat, that this individual, his passport issued by Hakani Network, he's on a terror watch list. This has not made headlines. None of the mainstream media are talking about it.

• 1:47:33Speaker 03

  The American people, they don't even know.

• 1:47:37Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know if they want to know. I think the, I think the American people are becoming very accustomed to just, they want to be lied to. They want to be told everything's okay. And it's just, it's getting worse. Do you think that maybe that the, the terrorist organizations haven't struck yet because things are wide open right now, it's easy to infiltrate? Do you think they'll wait until there's stronger leadership, until, until infrastructure begins to lock up and not allow them through? Would, are they patient enough for that?

• 1:48:17Speaker 03

  They're very patient. They're very patient. But is that why they haven't? I'm not going to say, I, I honestly, I can take guesses, but I don't know. Maybe the day you release this, there will be a terrorist attack. Do I think it is coming? Absolutely. Do I know exactly why they haven't done it? I don't know. But are they here? Yes.

• 1:48:38Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think that Taliban and/or other terrorist organizations are infiltrating our government? Do you think they are getting involved in local elections, like the cartels?

• 1:48:54Speaker 03

  I don't know. I don't know. Maybe not. But do they have lobbyists, supporters? Taliban and neckties and suits in Washington DC? Absolutely. Yes, they're, they're there. They have been there for so long. Just have a look at the speech of the current US special envoy to Afghanistan, Mr. Thomas West. He's really whitewashing the Taliban. Zalmay Khalilzat, he wants more collaboration with the Taliban. The US chartered to Afghanistan, Karen Decker, out of Doha. She's whitewashing the Taliban. In fact, she meets with representatives of Haqqani and Taliban all the time, in Doha.

• 1:49:39Speaker 03

  And this is the same individual who says there shouldn't be a resistance against terrorists in Afghanistan? And that she will not support any armed resistance against terrorism in Afghanistan. She's the same woman who said, who was asked by one of the most famous journalists of Afghanistan, Sameh Mahdi.

• 1:50:04Speaker 03

  He asked them on AMU TV, said, "What about Saraj Dinaqani? Is the US still trying to kill him, arrest him, put him in jail? Is Saraj Dinaqani still a terrorist?" She says, "I cannot answer." Sami Mahdi asked her, "Well, you work at the State Department. The State Department is looking for him. There's a $10 million bounty issued by the State Department for information on his arrest that would lead to Saraj Dinaqani's arrest." She says, "Oh, this is very complicated." She refuses to call the man a wanted terrorist.

• 1:50:38Speaker 03

  So your question was, "Are there Taliban here and involved in the elections?" I say, "They're in official, they hold official offices, and they're here."

• 1:50:51Speaker 03

  Just have a look at their statements, and then you tell me if these people are not Taliban sympathizers, or if they're not whitewashing the Taliban.

• 1:51:02Speaker 03

  Man, that's scary.

• 1:51:04Shawn Ryan?

  Is there anybody in our government? I mean, I know you're very well-connected. Are there any, is there anybody within the federal government that is against this, that's, that's, that's, that's trying to stop the funding? I know, I think Congressman Tim Burchett has a, some type of a bill coming that's trying to, that's trying to stop funding the Taliban, is that correct?

• 1:51:27Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 1:51:27Shawn Ryan?

  Are you familiar?

• 1:51:28Speaker 03

  Congressman Tim Burchett, great guy. He is at the House Foreign Affairs Committee. He already got a bill passed, introduced at the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and it passed. It's supposed to go to the House floor. I don't know why it hasn't gone to the House floor. But are there individuals? Yes, that are against the Taliban very loud. Congressman Mike Walz, Colonel, former US Army Special Forces, deployed to Afghanistan. He's the most vocal supporter of the resistance, of Commander Masood. And he is very much against the Taliban, and he is very loud. Congressman Brian Mast.

• 1:52:11Speaker 03

  Wounded veteran of the Afghan War, Dan Crenshaw. You have a lot of veterans. There are even veterans, it doesn't matter which party they belong to. Take, for example, from Colorado, James Crowe. I hope I'm not, I have his name correct. James Crowe. He's a Democrat from Colorado in Congress. Now, when it comes to the Taliban, he is, he's a veteran of the Afghan War. You can compare his statements with the statements of all the other Democrats, his colleagues. You'll just be shocked, man. So the Democratic Party right now is toeing the party line.

• 1:52:55Speaker 03

  They're refusing to say that the Taliban is a terrorist group. But these veterans, who are in the Democratic Party in Congress, I tell you, Sean, their conscience will not allow them to say that the Taliban is a good, that Taliban is not a terrorist group, that the Taliban is, there is such a thing as a Taliban 2.0. Their conscience will not allow them. They have seen what the Taliban do to women, to children. They know what the Taliban did to their own battle buddies. Their conscience will now allow them to say everything that the rest of the Democratic Party is saying. So you have veterans of the Afghan War who are elected officials in Congress, and they're in support of the Commander Masood

• 1:53:39Speaker 03

  and the National Resistance Front, and they're against the Taliban. One of those individuals, like I said, and that includes Congressman Tim Burchett. And there are many, many others. Chairman Michael McColl, the Chairman of House Foreign Affairs Committee. He's a true gentleman. He cares about not only veterans, but he cares about what happened and how Afghanistan was abandoned. He has held several hearings on Afghanistan. Have you ever watched one of those hearings, Sean?

• 1:54:10Speaker 03

  Bits and pieces. So have a look at like the first 15 minutes of it, and you'll be shocked. So you have Chairman Michael McCaul in the middle saying Taliban is a terrorist group. They have killed thousands of Americans. They gave safe haven to Bin Laden. He's saying all the right things. And then he hands over the floor to his colleague, the ranking member of HVAC, a congressman from New York, Gregory Meeks. And now listen to his speech. He refuses to call the Taliban a terrorist group. He does not support us. I don't know if he supports us or not on a personal level.

• 1:54:55Speaker 03

  Publicly, he is toeing the party line. He says the exact opposite of what Chairman McCaul says. And he comes from the state of New York, you know, the state that was attacked on 9/11. And he has already forgotten. Now, I say this, and I'm saying this not as a member of NRF. I'm saying this as an American veteran. Isn't there a single American veteran to challenge Gregory Meeks in New York? A single... Where are the anti-Taliban Democrats?

• 1:55:38Speaker 03

  Honestly, where are the anti-Taliban Democrats at this point? This is what I want to know. Other than these veterans that I named, who are Democrats, who, like I said, their conscience will not allow them, Sean, but where are the rest? Where are those who care about women's rights? They say they care about women's rights. Where are they? No women anywhere in the world are as oppressed as the women in Afghanistan right now. No women, the most insulted women are the Afghan women. The most oppressed women are the Afghan women. No one in the resistance is saying, Sean Ryan, suit up and come and help me defeat the Taliban. No one is saying this.

• 1:56:21Speaker 03

  No one is saying, you give me weapons, or I will stop the resistance. All we're saying is stop supporting the Taliban. And if you say you're for women's rights, well, then stand with women's rights.

• 1:56:37Speaker 03

  Stand against the Taliban. Forget about your party for a moment. Just forget about the party. There's something beyond the party.

• 1:56:49Speaker 03

  There's values, visions, things that make you who you are.

• 1:56:55Speaker 03

  We have reached a point, Shaun, where, I'll tell you honestly, I think people in America have forgotten who they are. They don't even know who they are. They don't know, they've forgotten what this country stands for, how this country, how this vision started. They've forgotten that. And if you don't know who you are, there's no way you can know who your enemy is. You don't even know who you are. So it's left up to, honestly, me at this point. To give you an example, I come from a bombed village in Panjshir, Afghanistan. I came here, this country, a very generous country, accepted me, gave me a home, gave me trust, gave me an education,

• 1:57:37Speaker 03

  allowed me to serve, gave me security clearance, gave me everything.

• 1:57:44Speaker 03

  Now, I am the one reminding them. Look, your founding fathers were your patriots. The guy whose statue you want to go and destroy and burn? George Washington, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, they're your heroes. You call them racist, slave owners. You have forgotten who you are. All this freedom that you have here, all the freedom veterans shed so much blood for to try to defend this, why do veterans join? It's not for paycheck. Why do people volunteer and join the military? It's not for, because we get a lot, the paycheck, the money is too much. It's not that, it's for this idea,

• 1:58:30Speaker 03

  this idea, what makes America, America. In order to keep this, we join, we sacrifice. But the people here, they actually have forgotten, like I said, who they are. They don't know who they are. They don't understand their own history. If they did, things would be very different today, man.

• 1:58:53Speaker 03

  What does the NRF need from the US?

• 1:58:58Speaker 03

  Right now? Right now. I'm not gonna, I'm gonna surprise you. I'm, like I said, I'm not gonna say weapons. I'm not gonna say money. At the minimum, stop sending money to the Taliban. At the minimum.

• 1:59:16Speaker 03

  And you will see signs of Taliban crumbling in under a year. But if, as a veteran now, I will say, I will say this to you. As a veteran, you know unconventional warfare. You know what a resistance requires and needs.

• 1:59:33Speaker 03

  Sniper rifles, drones, surveillance equipment, medical kits, uniforms. Resistance needs all of these things. So, we're not even there yet. We're saying at first, the first step, stop supporting the Taliban. But if you really wanna go and support, well, then you wanna just turn the tables, then these are the things that every resistance requires and needs. And keep in mind that what is happening in Afghanistan,

• 2:00:11Speaker 03

  it's not just for Afghanistan. The battles that are being fought there, the resistance that is fighting terrorism, this is an international terrorist group. It's not even about Afghanistan at this point. There is nothing else. What I mean by that is there's nothing else the Taliban, al-Qaeda, ISIS, and Haqqani could do to us at this point that they haven't done already. Our children are already in madrassas, brainwashed. They're going through this brainwashing school to become the future terrorists, suicide bombers. Our daughters cannot go to school. 20 million women in Afghanistan are not part of society. The Taliban brought in everything they could

• 2:00:55Speaker 03

  against the NRF, and they failed. They brought Pakistani air support. They brought Haqqani, al-Qaeda, ISIS. They couldn't do anything. We're still alive and we're still resisting. It's no longer about Afghanistan. At this point, it's about America.

• 2:01:14Speaker 03

  It's about what it means to be an American. It's about these guys are coming for you. What are you going to do? It's about who you are as an American. Keep this in mind, and I say this as a person who came from Afghanistan and this country took me in, and what I have seen in America. When lights go off in America, lights go off everywhere. It's no longer about us, it's about you.

• 2:01:46Shawn Ryan?

  Legends, I've got one last question. I think we've, I think we've pretty much covered just about everything, but my last question is, I think there is a very high probability that the US is going to have to intervene within the Afghanistan borders again in the future. Our kids are going to be fighting there. How are the Afghan people going to receive the American people, the American military, when we go back in there after we have abandoned them?

• 2:02:28Speaker 03

  The Afghan people, naturally, as any other people would be, they're pissed. They have been abandoned, their hearts are broken, they see their family members die and get raped on a daily basis. But these people are very resilient, they're very generous and forgiving people, they have seen this before. All of these people have put their trust into this one man, Commander Masood, in the National Resistance Front. Now that man will not refuse help if you offer help. So when America goes and America offers help, he will accept the help. But it doesn't even have to get there, Shaun.

• 2:03:12Speaker 03

  You don't have to go back to Afghanistan. The whole point that you were in Afghanistan, all these veterans served in Afghanistan, was to create a force who, after we left, would keep terrorism at bay. And you succeeded.

• 2:03:31Speaker 03

  That force is now the National Resistance Front.

• 2:03:35Speaker 03

  There's a leader, there's operations against terrorism every day. You don't have to go back there. No one is asking for the US to come back.

• 2:03:48Speaker 03

  There is a force. You can solve this by supporting that resistance. Start with the political office of the NRF.

• 2:04:00Speaker 03

  Start anywhere. But we don't have to go there. Our kids don't have to go there. Our kids could stay here, focus on everything else.

• 2:04:11Speaker 03

  Afghanistan is... It has the force it needs.

• 2:04:17Speaker 03

  It just needs our support, our voice.

• 2:04:23Shawn Ryan?

  Well, Legend, um... Do you... Do you have any closing remarks that we missed?

• 2:04:32Speaker 03

  I would like... Yes, a few. If you'll let me.

• 2:04:39Speaker 03

  As a veteran, I know what all these other veterans are going through. The sacrifices they have made in Afghanistan. I know what the Golds' families are going through. Honestly, I know what the Afghan people are going through. I know what the Americans are going through. And it's tough. It's tough.

• 2:05:01Speaker 03

  A lot of them ask if this was in vain, if it mattered.

• 2:05:07Speaker 03

  I tell you, it did matter. I go there. I still go there. I'll be going there very soon again, back to Afghanistan. And I tell you, it matters. It mattered. It mattered to the people there. It matters to the NRF. It mattered to the Afghan Army. It mattered. So don't think that it was all in vain. Don't think that it is over and there's nothing else to be done here. It's not true. Afghanistan has not collapsed. It's not over. There's still things you can do right now.

• 2:05:40Speaker 03

  Give us your voice. Get behind the NRF. That was the whole objective, the mission, to have this force that we would go, we would sacrifice and train, and this force will save Afghanistan, which in turn would save America. And you succeeded. So all of those sacrifices that you made, Scott Mann made, Travis Peterson, all of these soldiers, it mattered. You succeeded. We're at a juncture where, at this point, you can either say, "Oh, it didn't matter," and look the other way, and the Taliban will agree with you. It didn't matter. Or you could believe me, your fellow veteran, a member of the NRF, a person from Afghanistan,

• 2:06:24Speaker 03

  telling you that absolutely it mattered. And the people in Afghanistan are forever grateful for your sacrifices.

• 2:06:35Shawn Ryan?

  Well, thank you for saying that. Legend, I just want to say it's an honor to have you here. And, man, I don't even know how to say this, but I'm just sorry for how things turned out over there.

• 2:06:53Speaker 03

  I'm sorry, too. We can change it, Doc. We are changing it.

• 2:07:02Shawn Ryan?

  Sure, we'll meet again. God bless you. Keep up the good work.