KARACHI: The United States has lifted a $10 million reward offer for information leading to the arrest of a Taliban leader and interim interior minister of Afghanistan, Sirajuddin Haqqani, and two others, an Afghan interior ministry spokesperson said.

Sirajuddin was wanted by America’s Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for questioning, with the US offering the $10m reward.

He heads his own group called the Haqqani network, which has been designated a terror outfit by the United States for carrying out several major attacks on foreign and Afghan forces during the 20-year-long war in Afghanistan.

However, the Taliban insist that there is no separate faction within the group, according to Dawn.com.

Taliban see move as an opening to break out of their ‘global isolation’

Haqqani, who acknowledged planning a January 2008 attack on the Serena Hotel in Kabul, which killed six people, including US citizen Thor David Hesla, no longer appears on the State Department’s Rewards for Justice website.

The FBI website on Sunday still lists the reward on its website, saying Haqqani was “believed to have coordinated and participated in cross-border attacks against United States and coalition forces in Afghanistan”.

According to the media reports, Afghan interior ministry spokesman Abdul Mateen Qani said the US government had revoked the bounties placed on Sirajuddin Haqqani, Abdul Aziz Haqqani, and Yahya Haqqani. “These three individuals are two brothers and one paternal cousin,” Qani told The Associated Press.

“An Afghan official, Shafi Azam, hailed the development as the beginning of normalization, also citing the Taliban’s announcement they were in control of Afghanistan’s embassy in Norway,” an AP report stated.

The development comes only a couple of days after the Taliban freed an American citizen detained in Afghanistan for over two years following direct talks between US hostage envoy Adam Boehler and Taliban officials in Kabul, a source briefed on the release had said.

George Glezmann, a mechanic for Delta Airlines in Atlanta, was detained in 2022 while visiting Kabul as a tourist, left Afghanistan aboard an aircraft bound for Qatar, the source said.

Zakir Jalaly, an Afghan foreign ministry official, said the release of the US prisoner followed by the removal of bounties showed both sides were “moving beyond the effects of the wartime phase and taking constructive steps to pave the way for progress” in bilateral relations, according to the AP report. “The recent developments in Afghanistan-US relations are a good example of the pragmatic and realistic engagement between the two governments,” he said.

Sirajuddin was among the first senior leaders who entered Kabul in August 2021 but kept a low profile over the next few months. He would meet foreign dignitaries and Taliban officials but photographs from such meetings would always be blurred.

He once appeared on a TV interview but his face was not shown. He eventually made his first public appearance in March 2022. He is the son of Jalauddin Haqqani, who fought against the erstwhile Soviet Union in the 1980s. The senior Haqqani later joined the Taliban and served as minister in the previous Taliban government.

In December last year, his uncle who was then the Afghan Taliban’s acting minister for refugees, Khalil Rahman Haqqani, along with six others were killed in an explosion in the capital Kabul.

Published in Dawn, March 24th, 2025