• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Family of U.S. hostage held by Taliban calls for envoy’s firing

September 13, 2021 by David Barret Leave a Comment

September 13, 2021

By Jonathan Landay

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The family of Mark Frerichs on Monday urged U.S. President Joe Biden to fire his chief Afghanistan peace negotiator, charging that the envoy has done little to win the release of the last American believed to be held hostage by the Taliban.

The call for U.S. Special Representative Zalmay Khalilzad’s dismissal comes amid questions over his negotiations with the Taliban that failed to advance the peace process outlined in the February 2020 U.S. troop pullout deal he signed with them.

“I have lost faith in Ambassador Khalilzad,” Charlene Cakora, Frerichs’ sister and the family spokesperson, said in a statement to Reuters, charging that he “appears to have ignored my brother’s kidnapping.”

“They need someone talking to the Taliban who will make Mark a priority,” she continued. “Ambassador Khalilzad needs to be fired.”

A State Department spokesperson said in an email that the United States has been pressing for Frerichs’ “immediate and safe release” and those efforts “will not stop until Mark comes home.”

“We have made that clear to the Taliban in no uncertain terms,” the spokesperson continued, adding that senior U.S. officials “meet with the family regularly.”

The National Security Council did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The 59-year-old U.S. Navy veteran from Lombard, Illinois, worked in Afghanistan for a decade on development projects. He was abducted the month before Khalilzad signed the U.S. troop pullout deal and was transferred to the Haqqani network, a brutal Taliban faction accused of some of the deadliest attacks of the war.

The network’s leader, Sirajuddin Haqqani, who has a $10 million FBI bounty on his head, was named interior minister last week in the Taliban government announced after their lightning takeover of Afghanistan as the last American soldiers left.

Cakora alleged that Khalilzad failed to make her brother’s release a priority and “never even asked the Taliban about Mark in the month” between his abduction and the U.S. troop pullout deal signing.

Khalilzad, she said, “hasn’t even spoken to our family since Biden took office.”

Taliban officials have suggested they would free Frerichs in return for the release of Bashir Noorzai, an Afghan drug lord and Taliban associate serving a life sentence in the United States for smuggling $50 million of heroin into the country.

The family appealed last month for proof that Frerichs is alive in an open letter to Sirajuddin Haqqani, asking that he publish a recent video of the captive.

In the letter, Cakora also urged Haqqani to offer to trade Frerichs for Noorzai.

“My nation and the Taliban have been at war for a long time,” she said. “I know that when wars end, prisoners on both sides should have the ability to come home.”

(Reporting by Jonathan Landay; editing by Jonathan Oatis and Richard Pullin)

Source Link Family of U.S. hostage held by Taliban calls for envoy’s firing

David Barret
David Barret

Related posts:

  1. US Health Officials Favor Covid Booster Shots To All Americans As Delta Variant Cases Rise
  2. Russian editor decries ‘destruction of media’ before election
  3. Daimler expects Mercedes Q3 sales significantly below Q2 – report
  4. Motor racing-Bottas rules out imminent announcement on his F1 future

Filed Under: News

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

  • Have You Seen This Snake? Florida Wants Your Help Finding Rare Species Seen Once In 50 Years
  • Plague Confirmed In Lake Tahoe Area For First Time In 5 Years, California Officials Say
  • Supergiant Star Spotted Blowing Milky Way’s Largest Bubble Of Its Kind, Surprising Astronomers
  • Game Theory Promised To Explain Human Decisions. Did It?
  • Genes, Hormones, And Hairstyling – Here Are Some Causes Of Hair Loss You Might Not Have Heard Of
  • Answer To 30-Year-Old Mystery Code Embedded In The Kryptos CIA Sculpture To Be Sold At Auction
  • Merry Mice: Human Brain Cells Transplanted Into Mice Reduce Anxiety And Depression
  • Asteroid-Bound NASA Mission Snaps Earth-Moon Portrait From 290 Million Kilometers Away
  • Forget State Mammals – Some States Have Official Dinosaurs, And They’re Awesome
  • Female Jumping Spiders Of Two Species Prefer The Sexy Red Males Of One, Leading To Hybridization
  • Why Is It So Difficult To Find New Moons In The Solar System?
  • New “Oxygen-Breathing” Crystal Could Recharge Fuel Cells And More
  • Some Gut Bacteria Cause Insomnia While Others Protect Against It, 400,000-Person Study Argues
  • Neanderthals And Homo Sapiens Got It On 100,000 Years Earlier Than We Thought
  • “Womb Of The Universe”: Native American Tribal Elders Help Archaeologists Decipher Ancient Rock Art In Missouri Cave
  • 16,000-Year-Old Paintings Suggest Prehistoric Humans Risked Their Lives To Enter “Shaman Training Cave”
  • Final Gasps Of A Dying Star Seen Through A Record-Breaking 130 Years Of Data
  • COVID-19 “Vaccine Alternative” Injection Could Be On Fast-Track To Approval From FDA
  • New Jersey Officials Investigate Possible First Locally Acquired Malaria Case Since 1991
  • First-of-Its-Kind Bright Orange Nurse Shark Recorded Off Costa Rica Makes History
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version