Habibi
By Malali Bashir and Freshta Negah
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
April 12, 2026
Mahmood Shah Habibi’s parents don’t get much sleep, and his daughter hasn’t seen her father since she was 11 months old.
That was in 2022, when Habibi was abducted in Kabul and detained by the ruling Taliban’s intelligence agency, US officials say.
“We have had no news of his fate for four years,” his mother, Ruqayya Habibi, 70, told RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi in a telephone interview. “We don’t know if he is alive or not. We only know that he is with these people (the Taliban), but they deny it.”
“Believe me, his father and I have been awake every night from worry until morning,” she said.
Like her missing son, his wife, and their daughter, Ruqqaya Habibi is a US citizen. Her search for her son — or for any scrap of information about his whereabouts or condition — included a five-month trip from her home in the United States to Afghanistan in 2025.
Three of those months were spent in the southern city of Kandahar, where Habibi’s older brother Ahmad Shah Habibi had been told he was being held in a guesthouse belonging to Taliban spiritual leader Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada.
“I went to Kandahar with Habibi’s wife and daughter and my eldest son, who had come from London,” she said. But she did not see Habibi and was unable to meet with Taliban officials.
Habibi, 37, led the Afghan Aviation Authority under the US-backed government before US forces completed their withdrawal in 2021 and the Taliban returned to power 20 years after their ouster following the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
Habibi and his driver were abducted from their vehicle in Kabul on August 10, 2022, and detained by the Taliban’s General Directorate of Intelligence, according to the US State Department.
At the time, Habibi was working as a consultant for a Kabul-based telecommunications firm. His mother told RFE/RL he was detained four days after returning to Afghanistan following a three-month trip outside the country.
The Taliban has arrested dozens of foreign nationals since its return to power, and human rights groups have accused the group of arbitrary arrests, enforced disappearances, and torture in custody.
US citizen Dennis Coyle was released in late March after being held for over a year. His mother had pleaded for a pardon on the occasion of the Eid al-Fitr holiday.
Coyle’s release came two weeks after the United States designated Afghanistan a “state sponsor of wrongful detention,” accusing the unrecognized Taliban government of holding Americans as bargaining chips.
US President Donald Trump introduced the designation in September and Afghanistan was the second country to be listed, following Iran. “The Taliban continues to use terrorist tactics, kidnapping individuals for ransom or to seek policy concessions,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement on March 9.
The following day, the Taliban denied it was holding US citizens for ransom and called the comments “regrettable.”
In addition to Coyle, the Taliban has released at least five other US citizens in the past four years. Two of them, Ryan Corbett and William McKenty, were released in January 2025 in exchange for Khan Mohammad, a Taliban member who was sentenced to two life terms in prison by a US court on a drug and narco-terrorism conviction.
Habibi’s family has previously said the Taliban accused him of cooperating with US intelligence in determining the whereabouts of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the al-Qaeda leader who was killed in a US strike on Kabul on July 31, 2022, less than two weeks before Habibi was seized.
RFE/RL has been unable to verify that the Taliban made such an accusation, and the Taliban denies holding Habibi. A Taliban official, speaking on condition of anonymity, repeated the claim to RFE/RL this week, saying the group has no information about his fate. Taliban officials did not respond to RFE/RL’s requests for further comment.
“We just want our brother to be released,” Ahmad Shah Habibi told RFE/RL after Afghanistan was designated a “state sponsor of wrongful detention” in March. “We have some hope in the US government because it has tried from the start to free American detainees. We hope these efforts will lead to my brother’s release.”
Ruqayya Habibi said her granddaughter, now 4 years old, asks about her father constantly.
If Taliban officials suspect he committed a crime, she said, they should put him on trial. “He should be tried; if he is found guilty, he can be jailed. But now he is in prison without being proven guilty.”
Copyright (c) 2026. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Ste 400, Washington DC 20036.
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