Array
An American contractor held hostage in Afghanistan for more than two years has been released in exchange for a convicted Taliban drug lord jailed in the United States, the White House said Monday.
Mark Frerichs, a Navy veteran who had spent more than a decade in Afghanistan as a civilian contractor, was abducted in January 2020 and is believed to have been held since then by the Taliban-linked Haqqani terrorist network. He was traded for Bashir Noorzai, a Taliban associate convicted in a heroin trafficking conspiracy who had spent 17 years behind bars before his release Monday.
U.S. officials said the deal for Frerichs was the result of months of quiet negotiations.
Those discussions gained new momentum in June when President Joe Biden agreed to grant Noorzai relief from his life sentence, setting the stage for what one administration official described as a “very narrow window of opportunity this month” to complete the deal.
Biden said in a statement released by the White House, “Bringing the negotiations that led to Mark’s freedom to a successful resolution required difficult decisions, which I did not take lightly.”
Frerichs, 60, had been working on civil engineering projects at the time of his Jan. 31, 2020 abduction in Kabul. He’s believed to have been lured into a meeting to discuss a new project and then transported to Khost, a stronghold of the Haqqani network near the Pakistan border.
He was last seen in a video posted last spring by The New Yorker in which he appeared in traditional Afghan clothing and pleaded for his release. He was accompanied Monday by the administration’s special presidential envoy for hostage affairs and was in stable health, a U.
