A senior U.S. official says Qatar has agreed to temporarily extend travel and monitoring restrictions on five senior Taliban leaders released last year from the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba in exchange for a captured American soldier. At the same time, the United States acknowledges several Americans are being held by Houthi rebels in Yemen.

The U.S. official said the restrictions on the five Taliban leaders will remain in effect until a diplomatic solution to their fate is found.  The year-long restrictions on the five, imposed in May 2014, were set to expire Monday.

Appearing on U.S. television Sunday, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Brennan, said the five are Afghan citizens and he has personally been in touch with Qatari officials over what is in the best interest of U.S. national security.

“I want to make sure they are not allowed to return to the fight, and I think this is part of the rehabilitation process, as well as a monitoring and observing process.  So, arrangements that can be worked out with the Qataris and the Afghans, I think we’re trying to still look at what the possibilities are here,” said Brennan.

Qatar last year agreed to take the five as part of an agreement to free U.S. Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, who was held by the Taliban in Afghanistan for five years since walking away from his Army post.  He has been charged with desertion.

According to one U.S. lawmaker, at least one of the five allegedly had contact with members of the al-Qaida-affiliated Haqqani network during the past year while in Qatar.  Four of the five remain on a U.N. blacklist, which freezes their assets and has them under a separate travel ban, although the U.N. acknowledges their sanctions have been circumvented.

James Jeffries of the Washington Institute on Near East Studies, and a former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, said he is certain the U.S. put a lot of pressure on the Qataris to keep the Taliban Five from leaving.

“It was an outrage to hear they had been planning on traveling.  The American people were basically told, to one degree or another that in this transfer, that Qatari authorities would assure that these people would not return to the fight against our troops.  We still have 9,800 troops in Afghanistan. You let these guys out, [and] they’ll go back to fighting them,” said Jeffries.

As the U.S. negotiates the future of the Taliban Five, it is also, according to a Yemeni government official in Saudi Arabia, engaged in talks with Houthi rebels aimed at finding a solution to the fighting in Yemen. He said the talks, held in Oman, followed a U.S. request for dialogue.

Terrorism analyst Greg Barton of Australia’s Monash University said it is hard to imagine any such dialogue could take place without the approval of Saudi Arabia, a key U.S. ally, which has spearheaded coalition airstrikes against the Houthi rebels in Yemen since late March.

“There would have been a lot of back-channel briefings with Saudi Arabia prior to these going ahead.  Whether that means they’re happy or not is not clear, but I think it might be persuaded that these are the least-worst options, even if they’re not happy about them, they’ll accept them, but it’ll be very interesting to watch this space and see how they respond publicly,” said Barton.

Though a member of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), Oman has not participated in the Saudi-led airstrikes.  A U.N.-brokered peace conference on Yemen was postponed last week after exiled President Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi demanded the Houthis abide by a Security Council resolution and withdraw from territory they have seized before talks can proceed.

Meanwhile, The Washington Post reports the Houthis hold at least four Americans at a prison in the capital, Sana’a.  It says one of the four had been cleared for release, but the decision was reversed. 

The paper says the detention of the four, three of whom work in the private sector, and the fourth, whose occupation is unknown, holding dual U.S./Yemeni citizenship, has complicated U.S. counterterrorism operations. A fifth U.S. citizen, identified as Sharif Mobley, has been held on terrorism-related charges for years. The Post said they are among dozens of U.S. citizens who have either been unable to leave Yemen or chose to remain after the U.S. embassy was closed in February.  
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