In November 2021, the Defense Department’s Defense Visual Information Distribution Services archived over 120,000 photos and 17,000 videos featuring operations in Afghanistan during nearly two decades of war.

With the country under Taliban control, former Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said the temporary measure was taken out of “an abundance of caution … in keeping with our obligation to protect the identities of our Afghan allies and partners.” On or around July 3, 2025, however, it appears that DVIDS began to republish the images quietly. That’s according to a source who notified me of the change. The source also notified DVIDS that several photos, most bearing release dates of July 3 and 4, might endanger the Afghans whose faces and locations were shown. DVIDS notified the source that their flagged images had been removed for review. According to messages shown to me, DVIDS also suggested that the source flag any additional troublesome photos.

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I have confirmed that the source’s flagged photos and several others that featured allies have been removed from the web. However, numerous rereleased photos featuring Afghan commandos and Afghan military personnel remain online. In one photo, Afghan military personnel training inside the United States are identified by first and last name and rank. I have also uncovered photos of concern that appear never to have been archived. These include one picture featuring the faces of several Afghan National Security Forces members, and another showing numerous employees of a named Afghan construction company, which carried out millions of dollars in U.S. contracts. These individuals are likely eligible for Special Immigrant Visas due to the danger this work placed them in.

The Pentagon failed to respond to my questions about the rereleased images.

The ill-conceived rerelease of untold numbers of images of our partners is on par with the news from the United Kingdom of a 2022 data leak, which may have provided the Taliban a “kill list” of 33,000 U.K. Afghan allies, particularly considering a new tool in the Taliban’s arsenal. In February, the BBC reported on the vast system of 90,000 closed-circuit television cameras the Taliban use to monitor Kabul. Just 850 cameras were in use in Afghanistan’s capital prior to their takeover. The Taliban reportedly demonstrated that their equipment “features the option to track people using facial recognition.”

This system is believed to be operated by equipment from Dahua Global, a Chinese company. The company did not respond to my questions about whether their cameras can aid the Taliban in their reprisal campaign against their former enemies, or increase the Taliban’s ability to enforce onerous restrictions that deprive Afghan women of their most basic human rights.

Though reporting on reprisals has declined in the years following the Taliban’s rise to power, the Daily Mail reported on July 20 that 10 reprisals were counted in the days following the U.K. data leak. At least 3,200 former U.S. interpreters, Afghan military personnel, and Afghan government personnel are known to have been killed or disappeared since August 2021. 1208 Foundation founder and Green Beret Thomas Kasza explained the risks involved here. He referenced the elite National Mine Reduction Group member Omar Khan, featured in National Geographic’s 2022 documentary, Retrograde. The Taliban recognized Khan in April 2023. He was tortured for weeks and died of his injuries. Khan’s widow has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Hulu, Disney, and National Geographic.

Top line: DVIDS’s callous oversight and the DoD’s apparent disinterest in resolving this problem are an atrocious misreading of ongoing dangers to America’s allies. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth should do better. Those U.S. allies who were left to hide in post-August 2021 Afghanistan did so in the desperate hope the reprisal-happy Taliban would not discover them. The luckiest among them awaited absurdly slow processing for refugee and visa programs. Others fled to find safety through the U.S. border, and now may find themselves facing deportation.

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The source who discovered the discrepancy hopes that DVIDS will continue to display documentation of “people working towards a goal of a better Afghanistan,” but “black out faces and remove names of people and villages.”

I advocate rather for the re-archival of all rereleased photos and an examination of unarchived photos that could imperil our closest partners until this obvious threat is resolved.

Beth Bailey (@BWBailey85) is a freelance contributor to Fox News and host of The Afghanistan Project, which takes a deep dive into nearly two decades of war and the tragedy wrought in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.