Pentagon releases detainee held at Guantánamo since day 1 of detention in 2002

The Pentagon repatriated this Monday (30) a Tunisian detainee who was taken to the United States military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, on the day of its opening, was never charged in the war court and was approved for transfer more recently. of a decade.

Ridah Bin Saleh al Yazidi, 59, spent years languishing in prison of war because arrangements could not be made for his repatriation or resettlement.

He was airlifted from the base in a covert operation that concluded 11 months after the Defense Department notified Congress that it had reached an agreement to return him to Tunisian custody, according to the Pentagon. No details were given about the security arrangements surrounding his return.

Yazidi’s transfer was the fourth in two weeks in a belated effort by the Biden administration to reduce the inmate population at the prison, which had 40 prisoners when President Joe Biden took office. His departure left 26 detainees, 14 of whom were approved for transfer to other countries with diplomatic and security arrangements.

Another nine are in pre-trial proceedings or convicted of war crimes, meaning the White House will once again fail to achieve President Barack Obama’s ambition to close the prison. As the prison enters its 24th year in January, its mission has become more focused on low-key military trials rather than the prisoner-of-war-style operation that held and interrogated hundreds of war inmates in its early years.

Yazidi was the last of a dozen Tunisians once in prison, most of whom were captured in Afghanistan or Pakistan after the 9/11 attacks and taken to Guantanamo Bay as terrorism suspects.

He was sent to the prison of war the day it opened, on January 11, 2002, and was photographed anonymously kneeling in a rudimentary open-air compound at Guantanamo Bay’s Camp X-Ray, in one of the operation’s most iconic photos. of detention.

With his transfer, only one more person among those 20 original inmates is still in prison: Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, who is serving a life sentence for conspiring to commit war crimes as Osama bin Laden’s media advisor.

According to a leaked 2007 arrest assessment, Pakistani forces captured Yazidi near the Afghan border in December 2001, in a group of about 30 men believed to have fled the battle of Tora Bora. Some of them were suspected of being bin Laden’s bodyguards and were therefore of particular interest in early efforts to locate the al-Qaeda leader.

The assessment described him as a dangerous detainee who was hostile to the Guantanamo Bay guard force and was recorded for defacing a library book and throwing a cup of tea at a US soldier.

But in 2010, an Obama administration task force listed him among dozens of prisoners who could not be prosecuted for war crimes and were eligible for release to another country’s custody, with security guarantees.

Yazidi’s case has defied efforts by U.S. diplomats to transfer him for years. Ian Moss, who spent a decade at the State Department organizing prisoner and detainee transfers, said Yazidi didn’t leave sooner because Tunisia was considered too dangerous or uninterested in receiving him, and Yazidi was reluctant to meet with other countries that might have him resettled.

“He could have left a long time ago if it weren’t for the slowness of Tunisia,” Moss said on Monday.

Little is known about Yazidi beyond information contained in leaked US intelligence documents, which say he spent time in Italy in the 1980s and 1990s and was arrested and jailed for involvement in illegal drugs. From Italy, he found his way to Afghanistan in 1999, where, according to an intelligence profile, he attended a training camp for jihadists. It is also unknown what family is waiting for him in Tunisia, and he apparently hasn’t seen a lawyer in almost 20 years.