by Graeme Wood
In 1995, the Taliban used their MiG fighter jet to force a Russian IL-76 cargo plane to land at Kandahar Air Field. After nearly a year of captivity, the crew supposedly tricked the Taliban into letting them perform routine maintenance on the plane, and then flew away, under fire, to the United Arab Emirates. English Russia has photographs of the crew in Taliban custody.
If the crew had been American, Bruckheimer would have made a movie about this long ago. Here's the trailer for Kandahar: Survive and Return, which hit theaters in Russia this month:
Victor Bout, the arms dealer and logistics entrepreneur implicated in this caper, is still in a Thai jail waiting for extradition to US on charges of trying to sell surface-to-air-missiles to FARC.