Suhail Shaheen, ambassador of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) in Qatar, on Monday warned the new U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio against making threats after saying he would place bounties on Afghanistan’s rulers for their continued detention of U.S. nationals.

A prisoner swap between the U.S. and Afghanistan last week freed two Americans in exchange for an IEA figure, Khan Muhammad.

The deal to release Americans Ryan Corbett and William McKenty was brokered by Joe Biden ’s administration before he left office.

“Just hearing the Taliban (IEA) is holding more American hostages than has been reported,” Rubio said in a post on X Saturday.

“If this is true, we will have to immediately place a VERY BIG bounty on their top leaders, maybe even bigger than the one we had on (Osama) bin Laden.”

The IEA’s ambassador to Qatar, Suhail Shaheen, said it was the policy of the Afghan government to resolve issues peacefully through dialogue, and he fired a warning shot at Rubio, the Associated Press reported.

“In the face of pressure and aggression, the jihad (struggle) of the Afghan nation in recent decades is a lesson that everyone should learn from,” he said.

Shaheen said the recent release of another foreigner, Canadian David Lavery, from an Afghan jail had been achieved through mediation by the “friendly country of Qatar” and positive interactions with the IEA on such cases.

Earlier Monday, Canada’s foreign minister, Melanie Joly, said she had spoken with Lavery upon his arrival in Qatar.

“He is in good spirits,” Joly wrote on X, thanking Qatari Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani for helping facilitate Lavery’s release.

The head of the World Food Programme in Afghanistan says the agency can only feed half the millions of Afghans in need after cuts in international aid and an impending freeze in U.S. foreign funding.

Many people were living on just "bread and tea", WFP Country Director Hsiao-Wei Lee told Reuters.

Afghanistan was tipped to the brink of economic crisis in 2021 as the Islamic Emirate took over and all development and security assistance to the country was frozen, with restrictions also placed on the banking sector.

Since then humanitarian aid - aimed at funding urgent needs through non-profit organisations and bypassing government control - has filled some of the gap. But donors have been cutting steadily in recent years, concerned by IEA restrictions on women, including their order that Afghan female NGO employees stop work, and competing global crises.

Lee told Reuters shortly before finishing her three-year term in Afghanistan that funding cuts had meant that roughly half the 15 million Afghans in acute need of food were not receiving rations during this year's harsh winter.

"That's over 6 million people who are probably eating one or two meals a day and it's just bread and tea," she said in an interview on Saturday. "Unfortunately this is what the situation looks like for so many that have been removed from assistance."

Afghanistan's humanitarian plan was only just over half funded in 2024, according to U.N. data, and aid officials have flagged fears this could fall further this year.

The U.S. State Department issued a "stop-work" order on Friday for all existing foreign assistance and paused new aid, according to a cable reported by Reuters, after President Donald Trump ordered a pause to review if aid allocation was aligned with his foreign policy.

It was not immediately clear how that would impact Afghanistan's humanitarian operations, which in 2024 were over 40% funded by the United States, the largest donor.

"I think any potential reduction in assistance for Afghanistan is of course concerning...whether it is assistance to WFP or another actor," Lee said.

"The levels of need are just so high here in Afghanistan. I certainly hope that any decisions made, any implementation of decisions made take into consideration the needs of the people – the women, the children," she said.

Western diplomats and humanitarian officials have said aid is dropping to Afghanistan in part due to global emergencies in Sudan, Ukraine and Gaza and also because of concerns with IEA restrictions on women.

Lee said the operating environment had been a "rollercoaster" in the last three years, but that WFP was trying to prove to donors concerned about the plethora of restrictions on women that they were still reaching female beneficiaries and their children with aid.

Herat’s governor Maulana Islam Jar’s press office said Monday progress around the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) project is progressing rapidly and that since early last month, 6 km of pipeline has already been laid in the country.

According to a statement issued by the provincial press office, Abdullayev, the General Director of the TAPI project in Afghanistan, met with Jar and updated him on the project’s progress.

At the meeting, Jar assured Abdullayev of their full cooperation in providing necessary facilities to accelerate the TAPI project.

Last month, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’s (IEA) spokesman confirmed the start of practical work on the Afghanistan section of TAPI.

The first phase of the project will reportedly take two years to complete.

According to TAPI project officials, once completed, 12,000 people in Afghanistan will have job opportunities, and Afghanistan's annual income from this project will be close to one billion dollars.

The TAPI pipeline is 1,821 kilometers long and will have an annual transport capacity of 33 billion cubic meters of natural gas, making it one of the largest regional infrastructure projects.