Five former prisoners of Guantanamo Bay, who were exchanged for the release of US Army deserter Bowe Bergdahl, are now in senior positions in the Taliban’s new Afghanistan government.
The Obama Administration traded a group of Guantanamo detainees known as the “Taliban Five,” in 2014, against assessments that recommended their continued captivity, for admitted deserter Bergdahl, who had been taken captive by the Taliban after walking away from his observation post in Paktika Province in June 2009.
“The United States of America does not ever leave our men and women in uniform behind,” Obama announced of Bergdahl’s May 2014 release. Now all members of the “Taliban Five” are in high-ranking positions in Afghanistan’s new government.
Abdul Haq Wasiq, the Acting Director of Intelligence, was “was central to the Taliban’s efforts to form alliances with other Islamic fundamentalist groups to fight alongside the Taliban against U.S. and Coalition forces” as the former Taliban government’s deputy intelligence chief at the beginning of the Afghanistan war according to Guantanamo Bay leadership.
Mohammad Fazl, the newly minted Deputy Defense Minister, and former Taliban army chief of staff, allegedly had “operational associations with significant al Qaeda and other extremist personnel,” his 2008 assessment read.
Norullah Noori, who was formerly governor of two Afghan provinces in the previous Taliban regime, was named Acting Minister of Borders and Tribal Affairs. He is accused of ordering ethnic massacres in the city of Mazar-i-Sharif in 1998.
Former interior minister and now Acting Minister of Information and Culture, Khairullah Khairkhah, was a known opium drug lord in western Afghanistan prior to his capture and helped found the Taliban in 1994.
Mohammad Nabi Omari, the fifth member of the Taliban Five, was named governor of the eastern Khost Province in August. He had previously held positions as the former Taliban’s communications chief and border chief.
“They have American blood on their hands and surely as night follows day they will return to the fight. In effect, we released the ‘Taliban Dream Team,'” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., wrote in a 2014 letter to the Senate Armed Services Committee
Seven years later and the Taliban Dream Team is back in power after President Joe Biden handed Afghanistan to the regime the United States has spent twenty years fighting.
