Did 'Homeland' storyline predict US-brokered Taliban peace deal?
Is President Donald Trump a fan of Homeland?
By HANNAH BROWNMembers of a Taliban delegation leave after peace talks with Afghan senior politicians in Moscow, May 30, 2019(photo credit: EVGENIA NOVOZHENINA/REUTERS)
We know that US President Donald Trump watches Fox & Friends regularly, but is he also a fan of Homeland?That’s the question Homeland viewers have been asking themselves this week. The first episode of the eighth and final season of the Showtime series aired Sunday night, and it features American National Security Adviser and former CIA spy Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin) trying to broker a peace deal between the Taliban and the Afghan government that will allow American troops to leave the region.Two days later, the Trump administration announced that it had “conditionally approved a peace deal with the Taliban that would withdraw the last American troops from the country,” according to The New York Times.On Homeland, the deal is being negotiated at the Marsa Malaz hotel in Qatar, with the help (or hindrance?) of a Pakistani delegation.In real life, reports the Times, “For the past month, American negotiators... have been camped out in the Gulf state of Qatar, trying to persuade the Taliban to come to terms.”Saul thinks things are going smoothly, but suddenly the Afghan vice president, Abdul Qadir G’ulom, derails everything with a video message saying that the Afghans refuse to release any prisoners to the Taliban, which is the main reason the Taliban has agreed to negotiate. G’ulom is played by Israeli-Arab actor Mohammad Bakri, best known to Israelis for starring in the Oscar-nominated 1984 prison drama Beyond the Walls, who has appeared in many international films and television series, among them HBO’s The Night Of.The Internet Movie Database lists Bakri as appearing in seven episodes this season, so his story line is just beginning.The heroine of the series, bipolar CIA agent Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), is recovering at a US Army hospital in Germany from her six months of captivity in a Russian prison, following her release at the end of season seven. She is getting stronger, but she becomes psychotic after being deprived of her medication in prison, and her doctors feel she has a way to go before she can go back to work.But Saul, her mentor, summons her to one of her old haunts, Kabul, to meet with G’ulom, whom she knew when she was stationed there. Saul doesn’t seem overly concerned that she doesn’t remember what she said or did during most of her time in Russia, nor that she has failed a polygraph.Homeland can be seen in Israel on YesEdge on Mondays at 5 a.m. and 10 p.m., as well as YesVOD and StingTV. It is an American adaptation of the Israeli series Prisoners of War, which was named the best international television series of the past decade by the Times.
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