U.S. designates Afghanistan as a sponsor of wrongful detention, accuses it of ’hostage diplomacy’

The U.S. designates Afghanistan as a sponsor of wrongful detention, accusing the Taliban of engaging in hostage diplomacy.

The U.S. State Department on Monday (March 9, 2026) designated Afghanistan as a sponsor of wrongful detention as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations separately called out the country for engaging in what he said was “hostage diplomacy.”

With the designation, Afghanistan joins Iran as countries singled out by the U.S. in the past two weeks for their practice of detaining Americans in hopes of extracting policy concessions. Iran was given an identical designation on Feb. 27, one day before the U.S. and Israel launched strikes against the Islamic Republic in what has since become a war in the Middle East.

Read: Israel-Iran war LIVE updates

The designations are designed to ramp up pressure on both nations to stop taking Americans hostage or risk penalties.

“The Taliban continues to use terrorist tactics, kidnapping individuals for ransom or to seek policy concessions. These despicable tactics need to end,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement. “It is not safe for Americans to travel to Afghanistan because the Taliban continues to unjustly detain our fellow Americans and other foreign nationals.”

Mr. Rubio called on the Taliban to release Americans believed to be in its custody, including Dennis Coyle, an academic researcher detained in the country since January 2025, and Mahmood Habibi, an Afghan American businessman who worked as a contractor for a Kabul-based telecommunications company and vanished in 2022. The FBI and Habibi’s family have said they believe Habibi was taken by Taliban forces, but the Taliban has denied holding him.