WASHINGTON – Ryan Corbett traveled from his home in Western New York to visit his business in Afghanistan in August 2022, which was nothing unusual for him. He and his family had lived there for years, driven by their mission to help the people of one of the world’s most troubled countries by teaching them how to start their own businesses.
But the Taliban, the Muslim fundamentalist group that took control of Afghanistan a year earlier amid the Biden administration’s withdrawal of U.S. troops, abruptly decided that Corbett had no business being there. They detained the Livingston County man without charges and confined him to a basement prison cell with a handful of other Western captives, where he remains today.
He won’t remain there long, though, if his wife has anything to do about it. After months of quietly working behind the scenes to win her husband’s freedom, Corbett recently decided to go public.
“I realized that it had been a long time of waiting, and if I could apply more pressure and make a difference, I wanted to do that,” Anna Corbett, 43, told The Buffalo News last week during her seventh visit to Washington since her husband’s detention began.
Anna Corbett was initially inclined to remain silent, lest she raise her husband’s value in the eyes of the Taliban – but then she “realized that Ryan’s value was already high.” That being the case, she’s been sharing her story with the media and, most notably, at a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing last month.
Fighting back tears, she told the panel: “Ryan’s detention is a tragedy for our family. It is also a tragedy for the U.S.”
It was, however, something of an unnoticed tragedy until recently. After invading Afghanistan in reaction to the Sept. 22, 2001, terrorist attacks backed by the Taliban and fighting for two decades to prop up a democratic government there, U.S. troops were withdrawn from the country in August 2021. The…
Read the full article here
Leave a Reply