'Every day is about getting Mark home': Sister of American hostage fights for his release

A map of Afghanistan has taken over the wall of her dining room.

Charlene Cakora longs for the day when she can follow the map and find a way to her brother, Mark Frerichs, and his freedom.

“Every day is about getting Mark home,” she said.

But with every passing day, Cakora and her family in Lombard are left with the same questions, the same what ifs. The pain of not knowing is constant.

She said she's had to summon the courage to do TV interviews, to remind people that there is still an American held hostage in Afghanistan.

Frerichs, a 59-year-old Navy veteran and civil engineering contractor, was abducted in the Afghan capital of Kabul two years ago this Monday.

His abductors likely used the pretense of a new engineering project to lure Frerichs to a meeting in Kabul, brought him to a known haven for the Taliban along the Pakistan border, and then transferred him into the custody of the Haqqani network.

The insurgent group is closely aligned with the Taliban. The head of the Haqqani network is Sirajuddin Haqqani, who's also a deputy leader of the Taliban.

According to the National Counterterrorism Center, Haqqani militants are responsible for some of the deadliest attacks of the Afghan war and kidnapping for ransom schemes. The group was designated by the U.S. government as a foreign terrorist organization in 2012.

“The worst part is worrying if Mark has enough to eat, if he is healthy and safe in the middle of a pandemic, if he has warm clothes,” Cakora told the Daily Herald. “We wish we could speak with him, but the Taliban doesn't want anything from us. They want something from the U.S. government, and we need our government to act on this.”

The Taliban wants Bashir Noorzai in exchange for releasing Frerichs. A convicted drug lord, Noorzai was arrested in 2005 on heroin drug trafficking charges and sentenced to life in U.S. prison four years later. As early as 1990, Noorzai had a network of distributors in New York City who sold his heroin, federal prosecutors said at the time.

“We understand that the Taliban have been clear about what they want, repeatedly telling the U.S. government and media the same answer each time they were asked how Mark can come home,” Cakora said in a statement marking the two years since her brother's kidnapping. “He is only being kept as a hostage because senior officials have not presented President Biden with a decision about taking action.”

The family has requested to speak with Joe Biden twice, to no avail, Cakora said. And while White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan has spoken with some other hostage families, Cakora said, “we haven't been allowed to speak with him yet.”

The family did recently speak with Roger Carstens, the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs at the State Department.

“We know he is trying to get Mark home, but this is a decision that has to be made at the top,” she said. “They want to trade Mark for one of their guys who has been in U.S. prison for 17 years.”

Cakora said U.S. Sens. Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth have provided “excellent support.” Both have reached out to former President Donald Trump and then Biden and pressed other government leaders “to make Mark a priority,” she said.

“We must continue to push on every reasonable lever to secure the safe and urgent release of Mark,” Durbin said in a statement Friday. “I will continue to work with the administration to ensure that we can bring Mark home to his loved ones.”

Frerichs was taken hostage a month before the United States signed a peace deal with the Taliban in February 2020. Durbin and Duckworth denounced the decision by the Trump administration to “forgo efforts to negotiate Mr. Frerichs' safe release and return” when officials brokered the agreement with the Taliban.

With the withdrawal of the last American troops from Afghanistan, the family and home-state lawmakers worried U.S. negotiators lost another point of leverage.

“If we can work with a new Afghan government in a way that helps secure those interests - including the safe return of Mark Frerichs, a U.S. citizen who has been held hostage in the region since early last year - and in a way that brings greater stability to the country and region and protects the gains of the past two decades, we will do it,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in August. “But we will not do it on the basis of trust or faith.”

At the end of November, a U.S. delegation raised Frerichs' case with senior Taliban representatives in Doha, Qatar, according to the State Department.

“The safe and immediate release of U.S. citizen and Navy veteran Mark Frerichs is imperative,” a department spokesperson said Friday. “We have made that clear to the Taliban. As the Taliban seek legitimacy, they cannot continue to hold a U.S. citizen hostage. The Taliban must immediately release Mark Frerichs.”

Cakora said, “the Taliban didn't kidnap Mark because of Mark.”

“They did it because he is an American,” she said. “That is why we need President Biden to bring Mark home to us.”