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In the final hours of his term, President Joe Biden negotiated a prisoner exchange with the Taliban that released U.S. citizens Ryan Corbett and William Wallace McKenty from Taliban custody.
Not included in the deal, however, were U.S. citizens George Glezmann and Mahmood Habibi.
On Saturday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted on X that he was “just hearing” of the detentions of additional Americans by the Taliban.
“If this is true, we will have to immediately place a VERY BIG bounty on their top leaders, maybe even bigger than the one we had on Bin Laden,” Rubio wrote.
Neither the State Department nor the National Security Council responded to Fox News Digital’s requests for confirmation of Ahmad’s claims.
Fox News Digital also reached out to Taliban spokespersons Zabihullah Mujahid and Suhail Shaheen about Habibi’s detention and asked Mujahid what happened to Habibi after he was arrested by the GDI. Mujahid did not respond. Shaheen directed Fox News Digital to reach out to the GDI and claimed no knowledge of the situation.
Taliban fighters in Kabul, Afghanistan (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)
Former Principal Deputy Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs Hugh Dugan told Fox News Digital the Trump administration could pursue multiple “lines of effort” to secure the release of Glezmann and Habibi.
Dugan said this could involve “outright rescue by the military” at one level or continued “subtle diplomacy in the background.”
Dugan said he recognized that “to say we’re doing everything we can … is not satisfying to a family member, frankly, or anybody, and they want to hear that you’re continuing to identify what might have eluded us all along, or that there’s a crack in the horizon that’s opening.
“And we need to realize that that might be another step in our path to recovery and a line of effort has to be amended to accommodate new realities at any given moment.”
