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Agence France-Presse

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has threatened bounties on the heads of Afghanistan’s Taliban leaders, sharply escalating the tone as he said more Americans may be detained in the country than previously thought.
The threat comes days after the Afghan Taliban government and the US swapped prisoners in one of the final acts of former president Joe Biden.
The new top US diplomat issued the harsh warning via social media on Saturday, in a rhetorical style strikingly similar to his boss, President Donald Trump.
“Just hearing the Taliban is holding more American hostages than has been reported,” Rubio wrote 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,” he said, referring to the al-Qaeda leader killed by US forces in 2011.
Rubio did not describe who the other Americans may be, but there have long been accounts of missing Americans whose cases were not formally taken up by the US government as wrongful detentions.

In the deal with the Biden administration, the Taliban freed the best-known American detained in Afghanistan, Ryan Corbett, who had been living with his family in the country and was seized in August 2022.
Also freed was William McKenty, an American about whom little information has been released.
The United States in turn freed Khan Mohammed, who was serving a life sentence in a California prison.
Mohammed was convicted of trafficking heroin and opium into the United States and was accused of seeking rockets to kill US troops in Afghanistan.
The United States offered a bounty of US$25 million for information leading to the capture or killing of Osama bin Laden shortly after the September 11 terror attacks, with Congress later authorising the secretary of state to offer up to US$50 million.
No one is believed to have collected the bounty for bin Laden, who was killed in a US raid in Pakistan.


Trump is known for brandishing threats in his speeches and on social media. But he is also a critic of US military interventions overseas and in his second inaugural address on Monday, said he aspired to be a “peacemaker.”
In his first term, the Trump administration broke a then-taboo and negotiated directly with the Taliban – with Trump even proposing a summit with the then-insurgents at the Camp David presidential retreat – as he brokered a deal to pull US troops and end America’s longest war.
Biden carried out the agreement, with the Western-backed government swiftly collapsing and the Taliban retaking power in August 2021 just after US troops left.
The scenes of chaos in Kabul brought strong criticism of Biden, especially when 13 American troops and scores of Afghans died in a suicide bombing at the city’s airport.
The Biden administration had low-level contacts with Taliban government representatives but made little headway.
Some members of Trump’s Republican Party criticised even the limited US engagements with the Taliban government and especially the humanitarian help authorised by the Biden administration, which insisted the money was for urgent needs in the impoverished country and never routed through the Taliban.
Rubio on Friday froze nearly all US aid around the world.

No country has officially recognised the Taliban government, which has imposed severe restrictions on women and girls under its ultraconservative interpretation of Islam.
The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor on Thursday said he was seeking arrest warrants for senior Taliban leaders over the persecution of women.


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The threat comes as the US secretary of state says more Americans may be detained in Afghanistan than previously thought


The threat comes as the US secretary of state says more Americans may be detained in Afghanistan than previously thought.


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Rubio warns of ‘very big’ bounties from US for Taliban leaders

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The threat comes as the US secretary of state says more Americans may be detained in Afghanistan than previously thought

The threat comes as the US secretary of state says more Americans may be detained in Afghanistan than previously thought