U.S. citizen Mahmoud Habibi has completed two years of detention in Afghanistan as the Taliban continue to deny they are holding him captive. Earlier this month, the State Department for the first time verbally refuted claims that the Taliban are only holding two U.S. citizens.
In response to questions from Fox News Digital, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller named Habibie, George Glezman and Ryan Corbett at a press conference on August 8 and said, “The State Department is deeply concerned about the safety of Americans wrongfully detained in Afghanistan.”
Miller explained at the press conference that Glezman and Corbett are classified as “unjustly detained,” while Habibi is considered “unjustly detained. ” “We can’t err on the side of judgment because we don’t have access to certain types of information or the circumstances are unclear,” Miller said.
August 10th, The FBI released a statement: They, too, are “seeking information regarding Habibi’s disappearance.”
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Mahmoud Habibi is pictured with his young daughter in Qatar in June 2022, two months before his arrest by the Taliban’s General Intelligence Directorate. (Ahmad Habibi)
Habibi’s brother, Ahmad Shah Habibi, spoke to Fox News Digital about the circumstances surrounding Mahmoud’s detention, saying that Mahmoud traveled to Afghanistan in August 2022 for his job with Fairfax, Virginia-based ARX Communications because the Taliban “welcomed” Afghans to return and work for Afghanistan’s future.
This welcome was short-lived. On August 10, the Taliban Intelligence Directorate arrested Habibi and 29 of his colleagues, asking them if they had any information about the July 30 drone attack in Kabul that killed senior al-Qaeda figure Ayman al-Zawahiri. All but two of the ARX Communications personnel were later released.
Taliban fighters on patrol in Kabul, Afghanistan, on August 19, 2021. (AP Photo/Rahamat Gul)
Ahmad strongly denies that his brother was involved in the attack on Zawahiri. He believes the Taliban captured him because Mahmoud was deputy minister of civil aviation in the former Afghan government and is a U.S. citizen. Mahmoud became a U.S. citizen in 2021.
The Taliban have not officially acknowledged Mahmoud’s capture, so he cannot call his family or receive health checks from international diplomats. Ahmad said a source inside Afghanistan told the family that Mahmoud was alive, but he declined to give details about the source. “We are worried. We don’t know his current condition or how he is doing,” Ahmad said.
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Mahmoud Habibi, an American national and former deputy minister of Afghanistan’s Civil Aviation Authority, was a staunch defender of his native country until his arrest by the Taliban on August 10, 2022. (Ahmad Habibi)
Ryan Corbett (arrested August 10, 2022) and George Glezman (arrested December 5, 2022) are languishing in Taliban custody. A Senate resolution calling for Glezman’s immediate release states that he suffers from “facial tumors, high blood pressure, severe malnutrition, and other medical conditions” and that his physical and mental health is rapidly declining. A House resolution calling for Corbett’s immediate release states that Glezman has been held in solitary confinement in a basement cell, with little exposure to sunlight, fed on fatty scraps of meat, and is now experiencing “seizures, fainting, and discoloration of his limbs.”
Unlike Habibi, Corbett and Glezman receive regular health checks from Qatari diplomats and are occasionally allowed to call their families.
Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid acknowledged for the first time in March 2024 that the Taliban were holding two Americans in prison. Voice of AmericaMujahid repeated this message at the end of a contentious meeting between Taliban representatives and international leaders in Doha in July, when he said the Taliban “have prisoners in the US, we have prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. In exchange for them, we should release our prisoners.”
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Three Taliban officials whose names remain unrevealed As shown on CBS News In July, they said they would consider swapping three American prisoners being held in Afghanistan for Muhammad Rahim, who is being held at Guantanamo Bay, and two Afghans facing drug charges in U.S. prisons. By August, the two officials “altered their earlier statements,” insisting that only two American prisoners were being held, and that the third was “not available for exchange.” [Taliban] They did not detain Habibi at all.”
Last week, Mujahid She told Ariana News The Taliban have stated that they hold only two Americans “convicted in Afghanistan for violating Afghan law” and that “there is no one named Habibi in our prisons.” Ariana News appears to have become a mouthpiece for the Taliban since their return to power.
U.S. Army military police escort detainees to their cells at Camp X-Ray at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba, January 11, 2001. (Getty Images)
Rahim is the last Afghan detained at Guantanamo Bay, according to Bill Roggio, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and editor of its Long War journal. Roggio told Fox News Digital that al-Qaida’s intermediaries are “as nefarious as it gets.”
Roggio noted that a March 2016 detainee report from Rahim at Guantanamo Bay found that the prisoner had “become more committed to the group’s jihadism and Islamic extremism” while incarcerated. Rahim reportedly “continues to view the United States and the West as enemies, supports and praises attacks by other terrorist organizations, and has stated his intention to return to jihad to kill Americans.”
In December, Fox News reported, citing the Director of National Intelligence, that about 27 percent of released Guantanamo detainees had “returned to the battlefield.”
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Ahmad Habibi is representing his brother in the office of Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., who introduced a resolution on March 7, 2024, calling for Mahmoud Habibi’s release from Taliban custody. (Ahmad Habibi)
Fox News Digital reached out to Taliban spokesman Zabihillah Mujahid, head of the Taliban’s political office in Doha Suhail Shaheen and Foreign Ministry spokesman Abdul Kahar Balhi for information about Habibi’s case. Shaheen said he was not aware of Habibi’s case. Balhi and Mujahid did not respond to questions about Habibi or the Afghans the Taliban are trying to exchange for American prisoners.
As part of their work to defend Mahmoud, Ahmad said his family has met with the State Department, the White House and senators and representatives from California, Virginia and New Jersey. [Mahmood] house.”
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Ahmad said his brother’s arrest has affected his entire family, including his elderly parents and Mahmoud’s wife, Zulhija, a doctor in Afghanistan. The stress of defending Mahmoud and caring for their young daughter has forced Zulhija to give up studying for the medical exam to work as a doctor in the United States.
“Mahmoud is in detention but it’s like his whole family is in detention,” Ahmad explained.
