An American contractor held hostage in Afghanistan for more than two years has been released in exchange for a convicted Taliban drug lord jailed in the United States, the White House said Monday.
Mark Frerichs, a Navy veteran who had spent more than a decade in Afghanistan as a civilian contractor, was abducted in January 2020 and is believed to have been held since then by the Taliban-linked Haqqani network. He was traded for Bashir Noorzai, a Taliban drug lord convicted in a heroin trafficking conspiracy who had spent over 17 years behind bars before his release Monday.
U.S. officials said the deal for Frerichs was the result of months of quiet negotiations. Those discussions gained new momentum in June when Biden agreed to grant Noorzai relief from his life sentence, setting the stage for what one administration official described as a “very narrow window of opportunity this month” to complete the deal.
Biden said in a statement released by the White House, “Bringing the negotiations that led to Mark’s freedom to a successful resolution required difficult decisions, which I did not take lightly.”
Frerichs, 60, had been working on civil engineering projects at the time of his Jan. 31, 2020, abduction in Kabul. He’s believed to have been lured into a meeting to discuss a new project and then transported to Khost, a stronghold of the Taliban-linked Haqqani network near the Pakistan border.
He was last seen in a video posted last spring by The New Yorker in which he appeared in traditional Afghan clothing and pleaded for his release. He was accompanied Monday by the administration’s special presidential envoy for hostage affairs and was in stable health, a U.S. official said. His ultimate destination was not immediately clear, though a Qatari Foreign Ministry official said Frerichs would soon head from Doha to the U.S.
Noorzai, at the time of his 2005 arrest, hardly seemed an ideal recipient for presidential clemency. He’d been designated on a list reserved for some of the world’s most prolific drug traffickers and was prosecuted in Manhattan’s federal court on charges that accused him of owning opium fields in Kandahar province and relying on a network of distributors who sold the heroin in New York.
When he was sentenced to life imprisonment, the then-top federal prosecutor in Manhattan said Noorzai’s “worldwide narcotics network supported a Taliban regime that made Afghanistan a breeding ground for international terrorism.”
Monday’s deal underscored the two sides to the Taliban’s approach to illegal drugs. In April, they announced a ban on harvesting the poppies that produce opium for making heroin — an order that also outlawed the manufacture and transportation of narcotics. However, during the years-long Taliban insurgency, they reportedly made millions of dollars taxing farmers and middle men who moved their drugs outside Afghanistan.
Should the White House continue seeking deals with the Taliban?
A senior administration official, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the administration, said the U.S. government now determined that Noorzai’s release would “not materially change any risk to Americans or fundamentally alter the contours of the drug trade there.” Officials also took into account that Noorzai had spent 17 years in prison. They said it became clear from negotiations that releasing him would be necessary to get Frerichs home.
At a press conference Monday, Noorzai expressed gratitude at seeing his “mujahedeen brothers” — a reference to the Taliban — in Kabul.
“I pray for more success of the Taliban,” he added.
The Taliban-appointed foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, hailed the exchange Monday as the start of a “new era” in U.S.-Taliban relations and the opening of a “new door for talks.”
U.S. officials were more circumspect.
Though it does not recognize the Taliban government, the U.S. does have interests at stake in Afghanistan and will continue to engage with the Taliban in addressing the hunger and humanitarian crisis gripping the country, administration officials said Monday.
But officials said they remain concerned about whether the Taliban are committed to fighting terrorism and the exclusion of girls from high schools there, an issue that drew a United Nations reprimand on Sunday.
The Western Journal has reviewed this Associated Press story and may have altered it prior to publication to ensure that it meets our editorial standards.
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