Anna Corbett can’t remember how she broke the news to her three children in August 2022 that she didn’t know if their father was coming home.
Her husband, Ryan, texted her early one morning from Afghanistan, where he’d been doing business for years and where the Corbetts had lived as a family for more than a decade until the US withdrawal and re-emergence of the Taliban in 2021.
Ryan told Anna, who stayed back with the children at the new family base in western New York, that he was being questioned by Afghan police.
The message left her on ‘pins and needles’ for hours, she told DailyMail.com. She hoped Ryan’s predicament would turn out to be something minor.
But later that afternoon, she realized she had to tell her kids something was wrong.
Two-and-a-half years later, she still has no recollection of what happened and how her children reacted to news that their father faced a very bleak future.
She does, however, vividly recall hearing Ryan’s phone being snatched out of the hands of an also-detained colleague by Afghan guards as he tried to leave a voicemail the following day. The coworker’s wife forwarded it to Anna.
‘I listened to that message, and that’s when my heart completely sank – and I remember just totally breaking down at that point, because then I knew this is really going in a bad direction,’ says Anna.
Her life, since that day, has become a surreal juggle of school, work and everyday concerns alongside the constant horror of knowing that Ryan – a contractor who consulted with Afghanistan’s private sector on how to make the economy prosper – is wasting away in a basement cell in Kabul, more than 6,700 miles from home.
Between driving teenagers to practices and teaching violin lessons, Anna has also relentlessly pushed for US government help to secure Ryan’s release – visiting Washington 16 times and testifying before Congress in a desperate and unsuccessful attempt to get a meeting with President Joe Biden and motivate his administration to bring Ryan back.
Biden finally called her last weekend, when Anna was in Florida – after a last-minute decision days earlier to fly to Mar-a-Lago to remind incoming President Donald Trump of Ryan’s plight.
Anna began booking flights and packing with daughter Ketsia, now a college freshman, when news broke last week that negotiations were underway involving a possible prisoner swap between the US and the Taliban.
The deal allegedly concerned the exchange of Corbett and fellow American detainees George Glezmann and Mahmood Habibi for Muhammad Rahim, one of the few remaining detainees at Guantanamo Bay.
President Trump had told Fox News on the Thursday that he’d be ‘taking a look at’ the terms of the prisoner swap.
‘When I heard that President Trump was being briefed on the situation, I … saw a window of opportunity to just go down there,’ says Anna, who arrived in Florida on Friday and edged as close to Mar-a-Lago as possible – as she and her team continued liaising with members of Congress and networking with any sources connected to Trump.
On Sunday, Anna took a 5.30am call from her husband, who’s recently been allowed slightly more frequent access to the phone – while downplaying his suffering in conversations with his wife.
She didn’t tell him that she was expecting a call that day from President Biden – but not even eight hours later, her hopes were dampened by the conversation.
‘I was discouraged after the call,’ says Anna, who sounds emotionally fraught days later. ‘He was very gracious, but I was disappointed that it became clear on the call that he would not take the deal on the table to bring Ryan home, and I was shocked.’
She acknowledges that ‘there are a few days left’ before he leaves office, ‘and I am in constant communication with the current administration and pushing as much as I can, and I have to stay hopeful every day and expect that work is being done … President Biden did say that work will be done til the very end to bring Ryan home.’
Shortly after that call, however, Anna found new encouragement when Trump dispatched his incoming National Security Advisor to her hotel – where she spent an hour conversing with Michael Waltz, whom she’d already gotten to know as a congressman.
‘I was amazed to hear that he was actually taking the time in the midst of all that’s going on around the world,’ Anna tells DailyMail.com. ‘And he came and sat with us in a conference room and was very concerned about Ryan, shared that President Trump is concerned about Ryan … he listened well.
‘He really wants to see Ryan come home, and it was a very encouraging conversation. I was so grateful to be able to update him.
‘He asked me what I wanted from him, and I shared: I want honesty and directness and answers, and I’m very hopeful of what can be done to bring Ryan home quickly … it was really encouraging, wonderful.’
If Ryan doesn’t get released within the final days of the Biden administration, she says, Waltz ‘did say he wants to stay in contact and to expect things to happen quickly after the inauguration.
‘I don’t know what that’ll look like, but I’m hopeful.’
Maintaining that hope, however – after almost two and a half years without her husband and with maddening inaction from the US – ‘is tough.’
Both she and Ryan keep trying to support each other on their brief snatches of calls – as they endure impossibly difficult but different nightmares.
‘It’s draining for me to have to give strength and hope when I’m fighting for it myself, but he needs to hear that from us on these phone calls, because we want him to stay encouraged and not get depressed and just in a bad spot,’ she says. ‘It’s already hard for him emotionally … he’s struggling a lot.’
‘He has consistently complained of ongoing headaches, ringing in his ears,’ Anna says. ‘There’s been recent dental work that’s needed to be done … he’s not well. It stands out to me that he had said that I would not recognize him, and he’s only 40 – so that’s just really tough to know.
‘And he likes to be strong and not make me worry, so I don’t even know what he’s not saying to me about his physical condition, because other prisoners who were held with him have described much worse physical symptoms than what he has described … with frequent fainting and discolored extremities.
‘He’s not well, and it’s so scary that your husband’s like that.’
Caleb’s now in ninth grade and Miriam is a high school junior; Ketsia already graduated, after being voted into Homecoming Court, and she just made the Dean’s List during her first year of college.
It had already been a complicated transition back from Afghanistan, which the family left in 2021 – after living there since 2010 – upon US troops’ withdrawal.
Both Anna and Ryan had been born and lived as children overseas, thanks to their parents’ jobs; they met in college in Wisconsin and were living in Minneapolis when they decided to move their young family to Kabul. Ryan first worked for NGOs in the region but in 2017 began a microfinance enterprise after deciding ‘that the best way for the Afghan economy to prosper would be by helping Afghans start and operate their own businesses,’ according to the Free Ryan Corbett site.
Anna homeschooled the children at their four-bedroom rented house in Kabul, where they kept chickens, rabbits, a tortoise named Ruby and a cockatiel named Zazu.
The pets, and the only life the children knew, had to be left behind as the Corbetts fled Afghanistan in 2021 upon the Taliban’s reemergence.
‘It was just very overwhelming, especially for Ryan; he just really struggled leaving business, all the projects that were going on, and the chaos that ensued after the withdrawal .. he kept getting calls and people asking for help. It was just awful.’
The family was only really starting to resettle in Danville, New York – where Ryan is from – when he returned to Afghanistan in August 2022 on a valid visa. He’d already gone back once without issue.
‘He did some trainings, he paid his staff, just did some basic things to keep the business going, because it was still adding value to a lot of Afghan lives,’ she says. ‘He has a very strong sense of responsibility.’
So does she – and it’s been focused equally since 2022 on getting her husband home and nurturing the children who are growing up without him.
‘I’m trying … to not just wallow in this constantly, because we still have to live; I want the kids to have a parent who’s present with them – so it’s a very tricky balance,’ Anna tells DailyMail.com. ‘It’s on my mind all the time, then I also have to enjoy going to a basketball game for Caleb and celebrate their birthdays the best we can and have a lot of fun.
‘I have routines, for sure, where I pray for him; when I walk, especially, is when I pray for him – but then I don’t just focus on it all the time, or I would go crazy.’
During her trips to DC and meetings with politicians, she says, ‘adrenaline kicks in.
‘That’s great, but it’s not sustainable … I run out of energy very quickly and get very easily overwhelmed, and then I have to crash from the adrenaline.’
The children, she says, ‘have breakdowns, just like I do, but they pick up and they keep their hopes up and try to focus on what’s in front of them.
‘I’m really proud of them, but they miss their dad terribly and just can’t wait for this nightmare to be over.’
Anna, back from Florida and speaking from her home in Danville – where she just took down the Christmas decorations – admits that she still ‘can’t reconcile [the situation] in my head.
‘I hate it, and I hate telling him what we’re doing, and living these mundane things, and walking through the snow, and he’s just stuck in a cell … I hate it,’ she says, breaking down in tears.
‘It’s totally overwhelming – that’s why, like you can see, it makes me cry, because it’s horrible to have your loved one in those circumstances and I have full freedom.
‘I’m driving everywhere, flying everywhere, and he’s just been stuck for almost two and a half years.’