A video screengrab allegedly shows US soldier Bowe Robert Bergdahl, captured in Afghanistan six months ago
The Taliban has released a video purporting to show captured Pfc. Bowe (boh) Bergdahl. The airborne infantryman was captured by the Taliban more than five months ago in eastern Afghanistan. It could not be confirmed immediately that it was Bergdahl in the new video, which was released to The Associated Press and other news organizations.
The Afghan Taliban said on Friday that they had issued a new video tape of a U.S. soldier who was captured this summer, and added that in it he asks his government to take part in a prisoner exchange deal.
He is wearing sunglasses and a U.S. military style uniform including a military helmet, and details his name, hometown and says he is a prisoner of war of the Taliban. It is not clear when the video was made.
A spokesman for the Taliban said Bergdahl also urges the U.S. government to make a prisoner swap deal for his release with the Islamists, but Reuters was not able to access any such comments in online excerpts from the video by 0900 GMT.
"He speaks in English and asks for a (prisoner) swap," Zabihullah Mujahid told Reuters by phone from an undisclosed location.
The soldier, who was 23 when he was captured by the Taliban in southeastern Afghanistan in late June, was in good health, Mujahid said. He declined to provide further details about the contents of the video.
NATO-led forces in Afghanistan referred all questions to U.S. central command in Florida, who were not immediately available for comment.
In July, Bergdahl appeared in a video urging the U.S. government to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan. The Pentagon denounced those images as Taliban propaganda that they said violated international law.
The capture and detention of the soldier comes amid the bloodiest period in Afghanistan since the Taliban's ouster by U.S.-backed Afghan forces in late 2001.
To try and quell mounting violence, Washington has began the gradual dispatch of some 30,000 more American troops to Afghanistan, before starting to pull them out in July 2011.
There are about 110,000 foreign troops, more than half of them Americans, fighting the militants.
The Taliban released a new video on Friday purportedly showing US soldier Bowe Robert Bergdahl who was captured in Afghanistan about six months ago.
A spokesman for the hardline Islamist group said it was demanding the release of prisoners from US detention centres in exchange for Bergdahl's freedom.
The video features several clips of Bergdahl, 23, including one where he is in front of a carpet wearing in combat fatigues, a helmet and sunglasses, and another where he is seen shaven-headed in grey robes.
"I'm afraid to tell you that this war has slipped from our fingers and it's just going to be our next Vietnam unless the American people stand up and stop all this nonsense," he said.
Bergdahl, a private first class who disappeared on June 30, is the first US soldier to be captured in Afghanistan since the US-led war in 2001.
In the video, Bergdahl gives details about himself such as his rank, date and place of birth and other family information, as well as deployment details.
There was no immediate comment from the US military or NATO forces in Afghanistan about the video.
"We are ready to release him in exchange for the release of our prisoners but the Americans are not ready to release our prisoners in exchange for their soldier," a Taliban spokesman, Yousuf Ahmadi, told AFP.
"He is not being tortured or tormented. He is being dealt with according to Sharia teachings of a war hostage," he added, without saying what would happen if the Taliban demands were not met.
The Taliban issued another video of Bergdahl in July, showing a visibly shaken shaven-headed soldier pleading for US troops to leave the war-torn nation.
Ahmadi said the purpose of releasing the second video was to show to the world that the Taliban were winning the war more than eight years after the US-led invasion.
"We want to show to the world that this is an invasion of Afghanistan, they are invaders, we want to show we are winning this war and the invaders will be either killed or captured like this."
It was not clear when the video was made.
A man claiming to be a local Taliban commander told AFP in July that the kidnapped soldier had been taken across the border to Pakistan, where the Taliban are also waging an insurgency.
But Ahmadi insisted Bergdahl was being kept inside Afghanistan and was never taken to Pakistan. Such claims are impossible to verify.
A commander of the Taliban's Al-Qaeda-linked Haqqani faction, which is active in southeastern provinces of Paktya, Paktika and Khost which share a long porous border with Pakistan, claimed the abduction on July 2.
Bergdahl went missing from Paktya province.
In July, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton denounced his capture as "outrageous" and said the United States was doing everything it could to locate and free him.
Hundreds of US soldiers and troops from other nations have been killed in Afghanistan battling the widening Taliban-led insurgency.
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