A 2010 article from The UK’s Daily Mail reported Pfc. Bowe Bergdahl converted to Islam and taught Taliban fighters how to make bombs as well as trained them to ambush, one of his captors and Afghan intelligence officials told the British daily. :
A Taliban deputy district commander in Paktika, who called himself Haji Nadeem, told the newspaper that Bergdahl taught him how to dismantle a mobile phone and turn it into a remote control for a roadside bomb.
Nadeem claimed he also received basic ambush training from the U.S. soldier.
‘Most of the skills he taught us we already knew,’ he said. ‘Some of my comrades think he’s pretending to be a Muslim to save himself so they wouldn’t behead him.’
Afghan intelligence officials also believe that Bergdahl is ‘cooperating with the Taliban’ and is acting as adviser to fighters at a base in the tribal area of Pakistan.
Nadeem also shed some light on how Bergdahl was captured.
After the serviceman left his post in Paktika’s Yahya Khel district with an Afghan soldier he was spotted entering a nearby village.
A group of eight Taliban gunman in a nearby field were alerted and ambushed the pair, killing the Afghan soldier.
A seven minute video released in 2010 shows Bergdahl begging to come home. At one point in the video he says:
“I’m a prisoner. I want to go home.”
“This war isn’t worth the waste of human life that has cost both Afghanistan and the U.S. It’s not worth the amount of lives that have been wasted in prisons, Guantanamo Bay, Bagram, all those places where we are keeping prisoners.”
The Obama administration exchanged five top Taliban leaders on Saturday who were being held at the detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba for Bergdahl’s release. Bergdahl is reportedly in stable condition and getting medical treatment for dietary conditions at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany.
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