The Taliban have managed to restore some of the UH-60A Black Hawks disabled by the Americans

The Taliban managed to restore some of the UH-60A Black Hawk multi-role helicopters destroyed by the Americans during their withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021.

This is the aircraft that the researcher Lucas Mueller recorded from September 2021 to May 2025.

Work on the restoration of various types of aircraft has actually begun since the seizure of power in Afghanistan, as reported by Al Jazeera English in October 2021.

According to the data published by Scramble magazine, as of September 27, 2021, the Taliban captured at least 16 Black Hawk helicopters and their simulators in various technical conditions.

They remained at Kabul Hamid Karzai International Airport:

• 0-22966, 0-22988, 0-23269, 0-23283, 0-23296, 0-23318, 0-23370, 0-23450, 0-23457, 0-23595, 0-23607, and 0-23665.

At the air base in Kandahar:

• 0-23416 and 0-23463, of which 0-23463 was in airworthy condition due to a defector pilot who fled the unit with the helicopter before the Taliban captured the city.

And at the Bagram airbase: 0-23604. The fate of 0-23716 was not yet known.

A number of other airplanes and helicopters carried pilots and aircrew from Afghanistan to Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

Scramble cites only one aircraft – UH-60A 0-23280– that flew to Uzbekistan, but it is already reported that as of February 2025, some of the helicopters were taken away from there by the United States. This means that it cannot be the same aircraft.

In November 2021, the Taliban announced that it wanted to have its own air force, which it would create without relying on foreign aid.

A year later, in November 2022, Oryx published the article “Far From Finished: The Islamic Emirate Air Force,” where an estimated eight helicopters were identified as being in use by the Taliban.

Three of them were identified: 0-23463, 0-23665, and 0-23595.

It is difficult to say whether there are any duplicates among them. It is also reported that one of the helicopters crashed on September 10, 2022.

On February 8, 2024, Lucas Mueller published a photo with the identified helicopter 0-23450 on his X page.

On September 28, 2024, the researcher published a post with confirmed serial numbers in service (bolded as not previously reported):

• 0-20435, (from a September 23, 2024, Taliban post)
• 0-20450,
• 0-20463,
• 0-23595,
• 0-23665,
• 0-23924.

On May 10, 2025, he identified another Black Hawk helicopter recovered by the Taliban, 0-23296:

That is, along with the helicopter lost in 2022, Lucas Mueller identified at least seven Black Hawk helicopters in active service with the Taliban after 2022. He himself names 6-8 helicopters in operation currently in use.

According to the office of the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, there were 162 aircraft as of January 1, 2021, as cited by the BBC. Of these, 36 units are UH-60A Black Hawks. Thus, the Taliban managed to restore almost a quarter of the Afghan Air Force’s helicopter capability.