So this story has been evolving for awhile now as information isn’t exactly broadcasted regularly by the Taliban.
This guy Miles Routledge is a YouTuber with about 60,000 subs and 2 million views, (which is not enough to take a trip to the Taliban) regularly travels to some of the worst and most dangerous places in the world for content. He has videos shooting guns with Taliban militants, illegally crossing the US/Mexico border and more. He originally went to Afghanistan for the first time in 2021, months before the Taliban takeover and was forcibly flown out the country by the British military. He returned in 2022 and posted videos in which he joined a Taliban parade and fired weapons with them.
It is not the first time that Mr Routledge has visited Afghanistan. Last August, the blogger received widespread criticism for visiting Kabul during the Taliban’s ongoing takeover of Afghanistan.
He acquired a spot on a British Army evacuation flight to Dubai while thousands of Afghans who had worked alongside British troops in the country were left behind where they face ongoing targeting by the Taliban.
It is unclear why Mr Routledge, who studied physics at Loughborough university, again travelled to Afghanistan but it is believed he intended to shoot footage for his social media accounts.
Last August, Mr Routledge posted a video of him meeting with an alleged Taliban gunrunner in the city of Jalalabad after boasting of entering Afghanistan on a forged document. The video has over one million views on YouTube. he brands himself as a person who will “go to the most dangerous places on Earth for fun.”
Two other Britons, charity medic Kevin Cornwell, 53, and a second unnamed man who manages a hotel in Kabul, are believed to have been held by Taliban secret police since January following a separate incident.
Mr Routledge was arrested on March 2, along with two Polish nationals named as Adrian Wojcik, 22, and Roman Bilski, 24, and is being held for further questioning, a senior European diplomatic source told The Telegraph.
A Taliban security officer confirmed the arrest of multiple foreigners last week to the Telegraph.
The official added that the group were found partaking in “suspicious activities” and were being held with the Taliban’s counter intelligence department in Kabul.
With the social media world the way it is now and how important content is to some, people continue to press their luck and put their lives in danger for the very powerful phenomenon of clicks on content. We haven’t heard from Routledge on Twitter since the end of February and his family and friends don’t know if he’s alive or dead. According to multiple Twitter accounts, he is being held by the Taliban’s General Directorate of Intelligence or GDI, essentially the secret police in the country.
