Taliban leaders are pushing Washington to release an Afghan drug lord serving a life sentence in a US prison in exchange for the release of an American engineer, Mark Frerichs, who has been held in Afghanistan for two years.
According to diplomatic sources, the Taliban leadership also threatens to prevent the return of tens of thousands of Afghans who have US citizenship or have been selected for resettlement in the United States until drug lord Bashir Nurzai is released.
The drug lord had helped finance and equip the Taliban insurgent with revenue from heroin trafficking. He was arrested in New York for drug trafficking in 2005 and has been serving two simultaneous life sentences since 2009.
The State Department says 62,000 Afghans eligible for resettlement in the United States remain in Afghanistan after the fall of the government and the Taliban take over the country.
Frerichs, a civil engineer and U.S. Navy veteran, was abducted in January 2020 while working on development projects in Afghanistan.
His sister, Charlene Cakora, called on the Taliban to exchange prisoners and called on US President Joe Biden to do so.
Brookings, who most recently worked as a special adviser to the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, likened the Taliban’s demands to “blackmail.”
“The Taliban basically said that [στις ΗνωμÎνες Πολιτείες] “If you do not do what we want, we will keep the Frerichs and we will also keep the thousands of people who have been selected for resettlement in the United States,” Brooking said.
foreignpolicy.com
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