Taliban frees American citizen detained in an Afghanistan prison
ISLAMABAD (NYT) — Afghanistan freed a U.S. citizen Sunday, the State Department and Afghanistan’s Foreign Ministry said in separate statements, weeks after the Taliban announced an agreement with the Trump administration on prisoner exchanges.
“The United States welcomes home U.S. citizen Amir Amiry who was wrongfully detained in Afghanistan,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement. “While this marks an important step forward, additional Americans remain unjustly detained in Afghanistan.”
The Afghan and U.S. governments both thanked Qatar for its mediating role in the release. The Taliban continue to hold at least three Americans, according to a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of lack of authorization to speak publicly about the matter.
The Taliban have seldom communicated on the arrests of foreign citizens, and it remained unclear why Amiry was in Afghanistan and why he was detained.
Afghanistan has sought diplomatic openings in an effort to attract investment needed to bolster its battered economy, and to emerge from the international isolation it has faced since the Taliban seized power in 2021.
That has yielded few results so far. Taliban officials were barred from traveling to the United Nations General Assembly last week, and only Russia has recognized the group as Afghanistan’s legitimate authority.
The United States has kept a minimal level of public engagement with Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover, restricting it to hostage negotiations. But in a surprise announcement, President Donald Trump said this month that the United States was trying to regain control of the Bagram Air Base outside Kabul, which it occupied for nearly 20 years until 2021.
Marc Maron and other comedians rebuke peers in Saudi festival
(NYT) — Marc Maron, Shane Gillis and other top comedians have openly criticized their peers for participating in the Riyadh Comedy Festival, a state-sponsored event in Saudi Arabia that Human Rights Watch said was designed to deflect attention from the country’s “brutal repression of free speech” and other human rights violations.
Maron, host of the “WTF” podcast who was not asked to perform at the festival, questioned how the event would be promoted. “From the folks that brought you 9/11,” he riffed in a stand-up bit posted to Instagram last week, “two weeks of laughter in the desert. Don’t miss it.”
Saudi Arabia, a U.S. ally, has been at the center of a legal battle in which survivors of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, victims’ relatives and insurance companies accuse Saudi government agents in the United States of having provided “an essential support network” for the hijackers.
In 2021, the Biden administration held the country responsible for the killing of Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. The seventh anniversary of Khashoggi’s death will occur during the Riyadh Comedy Festival, which will run through Oct. 9. (The Saudi royal court has denied that it ordered Khashoggi’s killing.)
The event will feature more than 50 comedians, including Aziz Ansari, Hannibal Buress, Dave Chappelle, Kevin Hart and Andrew Schulz.