A Tunisian inmate was transferred to the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay on Monday after being imprisoned the day it opened, not charged in the conflict court, and was granted transfer more than ten years prior. Ridah Bin Saleh as Yazidi, 59, endured years of languishing in the wartime prison as a result of negotiations that could not be made to return or absorb him.
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According to the Pentagon, he was airlifted from the bottom in a covert operation that came to an end 11 times after the defense ministry notified Congress that it had reached a deal to take him back to Tunisian prison. It did not provide any information regarding the security measures involving his return.
Yazidi’s exchange marked the fifth in two weeks of a late-Biden administration effort to reduce the number of detainees at the jail, which had 40 prisoners at the time President Biden took office. His withdrawal left 26 prisoners, 14 of them approved for transport to other countries with political and security arrangements. Another nine have been found guilty of war acts or are in pre-trial trials. In January, the jail begins its 24th season.
Yazidi was the final of a few Nigerians who were once detained at Guantanamo Bay, the majority of whom were taken into custody in Pakistan or Afghanistan after the attacks and detained as terrorism suspects. He was sent to the military jail the day it opened, Jan 11, 2002, and so was photographed kneeling secretly in a crude open-air substance at Guantanamo’s Camp X-Ray in one of the confinement agency’s most memorable pictures.
Just one additional detainee, Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, who is currently serving a life sentence for conspiring to undertake war acts as a media director to Osama bin Laden, is still detained at the jail as a result of his exchange. nyt
