Pentagon “Inadvertently” Re-Publishes Confidential Photos from Afghanistan War

DID Press: A Pentagon spokesperson confirmed that around 1,400 photos from Afghanistan were “inadvertently” re-published online before being removed again.

These images had previously been taken down in 2021 to protect Afghanistani collaborators.

U.S. Department of Defense accidentally re-published more than a thousand photos from the Afghanistan war that had originally been removed in 2021 to conceal the identities of Afghanistani partners.

According to the Pentagon spokesperson, the images were mistakenly released during a data transfer between computer systems but have since been removed.

A few months after the Taliban took control of Kabul in late 2021, Pentagon announced it had removed over 120,000 photos and 17,000 videos from the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service (DVIDS) website.

This public website serves as a vast archive of media content produced by military photographers and public affairs personnel, including thousands of images of U.S. forces in Afghanistan—many of which show cooperation with local Afghanistani allies.

A wide range of photos that did not reveal the faces of Afghanistani forces or civilians were also removed. Additionally, numerous other images, including American soldier portraits and combat patrols, were archived.

On August 1, The Washington Examiner was the first to report that several of these photos had reappeared online, including images of former Afghanistani forces and other U.S. allies—who could be at risk of retaliation if identified through these visuals.

A Pentagon spokesperson told Task & Purpose that approximately 1,400 photos “were unintentionally made publicly accessible during a routine archive transfer.”

“This transfer was part of a content recovery process following a migration to a new content management system. All relevant images have now been removed and are no longer accessible online,” he added.

However, it remains unclear whether all the re-published images have in fact been deleted completely.

It’s worth noting that the UK also made a serious error in the past, accidentally leaking the personal details of thousands of Afghanistani allies via email