A former security force member, Rahmani, who had interrogated and investigated Anas Haqqani while he was in a Kabul prison returned to Afghanistan recently and met up for a chat.

Haqqani, who was in prison in Kabul for five years before being released in November 2019, said Rahmani had been his interrogator while in prison.

“Part of the interrogation and investigation of my case was his duty. I learned that he left Afghanistan after the liberation of the country last year,” Haqqani said.

According to Haqqani, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) appealed to Rahmani to return home, which he did.

“Now, like two close friends, we are sitting together and having a normal conversation. The only way to build our homeland and take away the grief from everyone is to forget the pains of the past,” said Haqqani in a social media post on Friday.

“We are very proud of our ‘past’ that rewrote the history of mankind, with many new events and lessons. However, we are not carrying the wounds in our hearts to the future,” he said.

Haqqani was detained in Bahrain in November 2014, at the age of 20, when he was returning from visiting freed prisoners from Guantanamo Bay in Qatar.

American forces arrested him and took him back to Qatar. After a day of interrogation he was transferred to Kabul, and held for nine months at the headquarters of the former government’s intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security.

He was then imprisoned at Bagram prison. He was released on 18 November 2019 in a prisoner exchange.