Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Saturday evening that the Trump administration has learned that the Taliban is holding more American citizens hostage.
“Just hearing the Taliban is holding more American hostages than has been reported,” Rubio posted on X. “If this is true, we will have to immediately place a VERY BIG bounty on their top leaders, maybe even bigger than the one we had on Bin Laden.”
Fox News reported that the other American hostages being held were U.S. citizens George Glezmann and Mahmood Habibi.
The news comes after American hostage Ryan Corbett’s family announced on Tuesday that he was freed by the Taliban, ending his 894-day captivity in Afghanistan.
Corbett was released just hours after President Donald Trump was sworn into office and after the Biden administration ramped up its negotiations with the Taliban in the past month. According to the Taliban, Corbett and one other hostage who wasn’t named were exchanged for terrorist Khan Muhammad, who was serving a life sentence in California.
“Today, our hearts are filled with overwhelming gratitude and praise to God for sustaining Ryan’s life and bringing him back home after what has been the most challenging and uncertain 894 days of our lives,” the Corbett family said in a statement shared with The Daily Wire.
The family thanked Trump, former President Joe Biden, incoming National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, incoming Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs Adam Boehler, former Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and former Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs Roger Carstens for “their tireless work and steadfast dedication to bringing Ryan back to us.”
Muhammed, the terrorist exchanged for Corbett’s release, was convicted and sentenced on drug and narco-terrorism charges. The Department of Justice said that Muhammed “sought to kill U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan using rockets” and attempted to send heroin to the U.S.
Corbett and his family first moved to Afghanistan in 2010 and started Bloom Afghanistan, an enterprise focused on improving the war-torn country’s private sector. The Corbett family safely evacuated from Afghanistan when the United States withdrew under Biden’s orders in August 2021, and then Ryan returned around five months later. He was captured by the Taliban a year after the Biden administration’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.