KABUL, AFGHANISTAN – The Taliban has released Faye Hall, a U.S. citizen who had been detained in Afghanistan since early February, former U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad confirmed Saturday.
In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Khalilzad announced that Hall was handed over to Qatari officials in Kabul and will soon return to the United States to reunite with her family. He expressed gratitude to Qatar for facilitating her release.
Khalilzad did not disclose the terms of Hall’s release. But, according to The Telegraph, which cited Taliban officials, the decision came after the Trump administration lifted bounties on senior Haqqani network figures, including Sirajuddin Haqqani, the Taliban interior minister.
Hall, a Chinese-American, was detained in Bamyan province on February 2 alongside an elderly British couple, Peter Reynolds, 79, and his wife Barbie, 75, as well as their local translator. She had reportedly travelled there as a guest of the couple.
The reasons for their detention remain unclear, though reports suggest the couple was arrested for offering parenting classes to local mothers.
Earlier, the couple’s daughter, Sarah Entwistle, told The Telegraph that Taliban guards had forcibly separated Hall from her mother and taken her away.
“A group of guards – both male and female – arrived with handcuffs and attempted to remove Faye. When both women resisted, clinging to one another and to the chain-link fence, the guards resorted to violence,” she said. “They were dragged kicking and screaming, with Faye ultimately being ripped from Barbie’s arms and thrown into an unmarked car.”
Entwistle also expressed concern for her parents’ health, saying they had been moved to an undisclosed high-security location and were being denied proper medical care.
Hall’s release comes just a week after the Taliban freed George Glezmann, an American airline mechanic from Atlanta, who had been detained in Kabul for more than two years. Taliban authorities described his release as a “humanitarian gesture.”
It remains unclear how many other US nationals remain in Taliban custody. One known case is that of Mahmoud Habibi, an Afghanistan-born American who has been held since August 2022.
The Taliban has previously detained Western nationals to gain political leverage or negotiate prisoner exchanges.
In January, the group released Americans Ryan Corbett and William McKenty in exchange for Khan Mohammad, a Taliban member serving a life sentence in a US prison for narco-terrorism. In 2022, prominent Taliban financier Bashir Noorzai was freed from US custody in return for the release of American engineer Mark Frerichs.
