"Iran gave the Taliban’s Haqqani network thousands of dollars in bounty payments for every American they killed, United States intelligence agencies told CNN on August 17.
Intelligence officials tracked payments for several years between the Haqqani network, a Taliban-backed group in Afghanistan, and a foreign government, which U.S. officials anonymously identified to the media as Iran.
Iran distributed propaganda leaflets throughout Afghanistan, offering $1,000 for every American soldier killed. “They weren’t hiding it: ‘If you bring us American heads, we will pay you,’” one American official told Business Insider.
Foreign nations paying terrorists to kill American soldiers is not new. At the end of June, U.S. President Donald Trump was accused of ignoring intelligence briefings about Russian bounties supposedly placed on American soldiers in the Middle East. However, National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien has since stated that the president was never briefed on the issue because officials deemed the intelligence reports to be lacking in credibility.
Bounties placed on American soldiers by Iran, in contrast, have existed for much longer and are much more easily proved. They did not begin under the watch of the current administration. They began under former President Barack Obama.
U.S. officials told the media that the payments began in 2010, two years after Obama was first elected. However, no action was taken at the time. “They’ve been sitting on this for years,” an official told Business Insider. “That’s what’s flabbergasting to me, that this is all of a sudden some big problem when it’s been behind the firewall for years at this point. Somebody needs to be held accountable for that."