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.
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Dennis Fitzpatrick, who is coordinating efforts outside the U.S. government for Glezmann’s release, claimed Glezmann was “never a serious priority for the Biden White House.”
“President Biden and [former National Security Advisor] Jake Sullivan decided to leave George Glezmann in Kabul for no good reason,” Fitzpatrick told Fox News Digital. “We are confident that President Trump’s clear-eyed leadership will secure George’s release to his family.”
Fitzpatrick added that 66-year-old Glezmann is “a totally innocent man” who was “a hard-working, blue-collar airline mechanic before he was wrongfully detained. He doesn’t deserve to be used as a pawn.”
Glezmann has been in detention since Dec. 5, 2022, when he was traveling to Afghanistan to “explore the cultural landscape and rich history of the country” according to a Senate resolution from July 2024 calling for his immediate release.
The resolution states that Glezmann’s mental and physical condition were deteriorating as a result of his detention in a nine-foot square underground cell. He has only been allowed limited calls to family and has experienced “facial tumors, hypertension, severe malnutrition, and other medical conditions” as a result of his detention.
While the Taliban admit to holding Glezmann in custody, they insist they do not hold Mahmood Habibi.
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Habibi’s brother Ahmad told Fox News Digital the family “know[s] that my brother is still in Taliban custody. I can’t share too much about that because we don’t want to put him or others at risk. But anyone accepting the Taliban’s hollow suggestions that they do not have him is falling for their lies.
“We have multiple witnesses to his arrest by the [General Directorate of Intelligence (GDI)]. We have multiple witnesses who were held with him at GDI headquarters. The Taliban has always claimed they don’t have him and don’t know who he is. How do they explain the obvious contradictions to this?”
Ahmad also claimed the family “know[s] that the U.S. government has technical evidence that Mahmood was in GDI custody long after his arrest.”
He alleges the Biden National Security Council “micromanaged the State Department’s effort to secure my brother’s release” and “blocked [the State Department] from using the data in their discussions with the Taliban, even though we told them that it would have directly confronted the Taliban’s claims that they never heard of my brother.”
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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.
The Taliban have long sought the release of Guantanamo Bay detainee and al Qaeda facilitator Muhammad Rahim in exchange for the Americans they admitted were in their prisons. Ahmad Habibi told CBS News President Biden assured him in a Jan. 12 phone call that the U.S. would not release Rahim unless the Taliban released Habibi.
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.”
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