In January 2025, an American citizen, Dennis Coyle, was taken into custody by the Afghan authorities. The ruling Taliban claimed Mr. Coyle had violated their laws, but declined to name what laws Mr. Coyle had broken.
In an interview with NewsNation host Katie Pavlich last January, President Trump vowed to bring Dennis Coyle home. Now, Mr. Coyle has been released and is on his way back to the United States.
JUST IN EXCLUSIVE: The first photo of American Dennis Coyle as a free man.
— Katie Pavlich (@KatiePavlich) March 24, 2026
President Trump said during our @NewsNation interview on January 20, 2026 that he would work to get Dennis released. He directed his team to get it done and two months later, Dennis is coming home.
🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/SwTC4ddXvW
The Taliban is claiming that Mr. Coyle was released, in effect, in a "time served" release. An AP report claims that Mr. Coyle's time behind bars was sufficient for whatever it is they are claiming he did, which the Afghan regime still isn't specifying.
Afghanistan’s Taliban authorities on Tuesday released American academic Dennis Coyle after holding him for over a year, with the Foreign Ministry saying the release came on the occasion of Eid al-Fitr, the Muslim holiday that marks the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.
A statement from the ministry said the academic researcher had been released in Kabul, the country’s capital, following an appeal from his family and after Afghanistan’s Supreme Court “considered his previous imprisonment sufficient.”
Coyle was detained in January 2025. Afghan authorities accused him of violating laws, but never specified which ones.
Here in the Western world we are accustomed to things like due process, and this case should serve as a reminder that in much of the world, that's just simply not the case.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said:
“President (Donald) Trump is committed to ending unjust detentions overseas – Dennis joins over 100 Americans who have been freed in the past 15 months under his second term in office,” Rubio said in a statement. “While this is a positive step by the Taliban, more work needs to be done,” he added.
Good news, indeed.
Read More: Pakistan Pledges 'Open War' With Afghanistan; Taliban's Supreme Emir Reported Killed in Airstrike
What makes the initial detention of Dennis Coyle by Afghanistan outrageous is that he was a linguistics researcher from Colorado: Not a military member, not a security contractor; he was in no way connected or involved with anything of a military nature. He was in Afghanistan for over 20 years, studying that country's several languages. It's baffling to see how the Afghan government could have seen him as any kind of threat, and as noted, they aren't stating what he was accused of doing.
The Foley Foundation, which tracks Americans held hostage overseas, had this to say about Dennis Coyle's captivity:
He spent years living in Afghanistan, among the Afghan people, steeped in their language and culture. The people who know him there love and respect him. However, as the Taliban has done in the past, they kidnapped Dennis so they could leverage him. On January 27, 2025, Dennis was detained without charges by the Taliban General Directorate of Intelligence while legally working to support Afghan language communities as an academic researcher. To this day, he has not been charged with any crime.
And, he never was - but now, he's on his way home. That's what America should do - no matter why an American was in any particular place, when an American is taken, essentially, as a hostage, we bring them home. No matter how we have to do it, we bring them home.
Now Dennis Coyle is headed home. That may be the best news of the day.
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