Washington’s former envoy to Kabul says an American citizen has been released by the Taliban government after being held for two months.
Faye Hall was detained in February alongside a British couple in their seventies, Barbie and Peter Reynolds, and their Afghan interpreter.
The couple ran training programmes for women and girls, and decided to stay after the Taliban returned to power. Afghan officials have not made the reason for their arrest public.
Zalmay Khalilzad, who served as the US special representative for Afghanistan from 2018-2021, said on the social media platform X that Ms Hall will “soon be heading home” and is currently in the care of Qatari officials.
In his announcement, Mr Khalilzad thanked Qatar, which acts as a mediator between the US and Afghanistan.
The US State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Ms Hall is the fourth US citizen released by the Taliban since January after Qatar brokered an agreement with them. Just days earlier, they freed another American, George Glezmann.
At the time, the government said the airline mechanic was released on “humanitarian grounds,” and that the decision was a “goodwill gesture”.
These decisions also come after US officials were hosted in the Afghan capital Kabul.
Those were the highest-level direct talks between the two countries since President Trump’s inauguration, though the new American administration’s policy plans for the Taliban and Afghanistan remain unclear.
When he was last in power, Trump negotiated the end of the US war in Taliban by agreeing to a 14-month deadline to withdraw US troops and allied forces.
The agreement was criticised, as it left out the Western-backed and democratically-elected Afghan government, which was quickly toppled by Taliban forces during the US’s disastrous withdrawal in 2021.
Trump has blamed his predecessor, Joe Biden, for the chaotic exit, which included a bombing at the Kabul airport. The attack killed at least 170 Afghan civilians and 13 US soldiers.
Ms Hall’s hosts, Barbie and Peter Reynolds remain in detention. The couple met at the University of Bath, married in Kabul in 1970 and have run educational programmes in the region for years.
When the Taliban returned to power in 2021, they were among the few westerners who decided to stay.
Their daughter, Sarah Entwistle, told the Sunday Times: “They said they could not leave when Afghans were in their hour of need.”
She said her parents were “meticulous about keeping by the rules even as they kept changing”.
Ms Hall was arrested while travelling with the couple to their home in central Bamyan province.
Ms Entwistle has said that her 79-year-old father is suffering severe medical issues while imprisoned, including a chest infection, eye infections and digestive issues. She has alleged that he has also been beaten since being detained.
“Our desperate appeal to the Taliban is that they release them to their home, where they have the medication he needs to survive,” she told the Sunday Times.
