By South China Morning Post | Created at 2025-01-26 05:56:19 | Updated at 2025-01-27 04:18:23
22 hours ago
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.
