
THE DAILY WIRE | Published January 26, 2025
Rubio was praised online for the strong statement he made.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Saturday evening that the Trump administration has learned that the Taliban is holding more American citizens hostage.
“Just hearing the Taliban is holding more American hostages than has been reported,” Rubio posted on X. “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 did not release any other details about the hostages who are being held by the Taliban.
Fox News reported that the other American hostages being held were U.S. citizens George Glezmann and Mahmood Habibi.
The news comes after American hostage Ryan Corbett’s family announced on Tuesday that he was freed by the Taliban, ending his 894-day captivity in Afghanistan.
Corbett was released just hours after President Donald Trump was sworn into office and after the Biden administration ramped up its negotiations with the Taliban in the past month. According to the Taliban, Corbett and one other hostage who wasn’t named were exchanged for terrorist Khan Muhammad, who was serving a life sentence in California.
“Today, our hearts are filled with overwhelming gratitude and praise to God for sustaining Ryan’s life and bringing him back home after what has been the most challenging and uncertain 894 days of our lives,” the Corbett family said in a statement shared with The Daily Wire.
The family thanked Trump, former President Joe Biden, incoming National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, incoming Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs Adam Boehler, former Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and former Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs Roger Carstens for “their tireless work and steadfast dedication to bringing Ryan back to us.”
Muhammed, the terrorist exchanged for Corbett’s release, was convicted and sentenced on drug and narco-terrorism charges. The Department of Justice said that Muhammed “sought to kill U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan using rockets” and attempted to send heroin to the U.S.
Corbett and his family first moved to Afghanistan in 2010 and started Bloom Afghanistan, an enterprise focused on improving the war-torn country’s private sector. The Corbett family safely evacuated from Afghanistan when the United States withdrew under Biden’s orders in August 2021, and then Ryan returned around five months later. He was captured by the Taliban a year after the Biden administration’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.
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SOURCE: www.dailywire.com
RELATED: Rubio Threatens Bounties on Taliban Leaders Over Detained Americans
NEWSMAX | Published January 26, 2025
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Saturday threatened bounties on the heads of Afghanistan’s Taliban leaders, sharply escalating the tone as he said more Americans may be detained in the country than previously thought.
The threat comes days after the Afghan Taliban government and the United States swapped prisoners in one of the final acts of former president Joe Biden.
The new top US diplomat issued the harsh warning via social media, in a rhetorical style strikingly similar to his boss, President Donald Trump.
“Just hearing the Taliban is holding more American hostages than has been reported,” Rubio wrote on X.
“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,” he said, referring to the Al-Qaeda leader killed by US forces in 2011.
Rubio did not describe who the other Americans may be, but there have long been accounts of missing Americans whose cases were not formally taken up by the US government as wrongful detentions.
In the deal with the Biden administration, the Taliban freed the best-known American detained in Afghanistan, Ryan Corbett, who had been living with his family in the country and was seized in August 2022.
Also freed was William McKenty, an American about whom little information has been released.
The United States in turn freed Khan Mohammed, who was serving a life sentence in a California prison.
Mohammed was convicted of trafficking heroin and opium into the United States and was accused of seeking rockets to kill US troops in Afghanistan.
The United States offered a bounty of $25 million for information leading to the capture or killing of Osama bin Laden shortly after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, with Congress later authorizing the secretary of state to offer up to $50 million.
No one is believed to have collected the bounty for bin Laden, who was killed in a US raid in Pakistan.
– Harder line on Taliban? –
Trump is known for brandishing threats in his speeches and on social media. But he is also a critic of US military interventions overseas and in his second inaugural address Monday said he aspired to be a “peacemaker.”
In his first term, the Trump administration broke a then-taboo and negotiated directly with the Taliban — with Trump even proposing a summit with the then-insurgents at the Camp David presidential retreat — as he brokered a deal to pull US troops and end America’s longest war.
Biden carried out the agreement, with the Western-backed government swiftly collapsing and the Taliban retaking power in August 2021 just after US troops left.
The scenes of chaos in Kabul brought strong criticism of Biden, especially when 13 American troops and scores of Afghans died in a suicide bombing at the city’s airport.
The Biden administration had low-level contacts with Taliban government representatives but made little headway.
Some members of Trump’s Republican Party criticized even the limited US engagements with the Taliban government and especially the humanitarian assistance authorized by the Biden administration, which insisted the money was for urgent needs in the impoverished country and never routed through the Taliban.
Rubio on Friday froze nearly all US aid around the world.
No country has officially recognized the Taliban government, which has imposed severe restrictions on women and girls under its ultra-conservative interpretation of Islam.
The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor on Thursday said he was seeking arrest warrants for senior Taliban leaders over the persecution of women.
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SOURCE: www.newsmax.com
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