AFGHAN SITREP Get Out of Jail Free Card for 490 Taliban Prisoners; Afghan Civilians Freed From Prisons; Taliban, ANA Take Hits

The Afghan government says it has freed 490 Taliban prisoners from jails across the country in a gesture of good will as part of efforts to move a stalled peace process forward.  Feroz Bashari, government media center chief, told the Associated Press on 13 June that the freed Taliban insurgents were either ailing or had less than a year remaining on their prison sentence.

President Ashraf Ghani has ordered that 887 prisoners be freed in conjunction with the recent holiday of  Eid-al-Fitr,  “Festival of Breaking the Fast”, a Muslim holiday that marks the end of Ramadan.

“The Taliban prisoners were released unconditionally. They are not required to denounce the Taliban or promise to quit the fight against the Afghan government. Historically, Taliban prisoners who have been freed from Afghan prisons have returned to the battlefield,” said Bill Roggio, a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “The Taliban has not acknowledged the release of its prisoners. It has been unmoved by such gestures in the past, and are likely to ignore the latest,” Fox news, added, confirming the number of freed prisoners.

Those prisoners were not the super bad guys. Afghan MOD continues regular reports of how many Taliban insurgents the Afghan National Army has killed. MOD has reported over 250 insurgents killed just from 8 June to 10 June.

Meanwhile, in last few weeks the ANA has busted several Afghan citizens out of prisons.

Afghan Special Forces broke into a pair of Taliban prisons Thursday in southern Afghanistan and freed more than 100 prisoners, including women held by the Taliban, an Afghan official told VOA.

General Mohammad Radmanesh, a spokesman for the Afghan Ministry of Defense, told VOA that Afghan security forces acted on intelligence received about two compounds in the Kajaki district of Helmand province, where insurgents were holding dozens of people.

“The operation was conducted based on an intelligence tip, and Afghan Special Forces managed to free 105 people, 103 of them civilians, including five women,” Radmanesh said.

the Afghan MOD does not give the numbers for ANA forces killed in recent weeks, although several attacks on ANA posts have been reported.