July 11, 2016
The Department of Defense announced today the transfer of Muhammadi Davlatov and Mansur Ahmad Saad al-Dayfi from the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay to the Government of Serbia.
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76 Detainees remain at Gitmo
From left, Mansoor al Dayfi, a Yemeni, and Umar Abdulayev, a Tajik, who were taken to Guantánamo Bay from Afghanistan on the same day, Feb. 9, 2002 pose for the International Committee of the Red Cross in separate undated photos provided by their attorneys.
Spotted in Guantánamo’s stacks of books for the detainees: A copy of a Serbian-English dictionary and phrase book that looked and felt like it had never been cracked before it was pulled from a shelf on Saturday, July 9, 2016. The stamp says it was approved for the detainees on July 21, 2009.
The weekend releases to Italy and Serbia raised to 30 the number of countries that have resettled detainees for the Obama administration.
MiamiHerald: The Pentagon said Monday it delivered two prisoners to Serbia, ending more than 14 years of detention without charges and wrapping up a weekend of releases that downsized the captive population to 76.
One, a Tajik known here as Umar Abdulayev, 37, had been cleared for release by both Bush and Obama administration review panels but resisted repatriation. In 2009 he announced through his lawyer that he was so fearful of return that he’d rather spend the rest of his life on this remote base in southeast Cuba.
The other, a Yemeni named Mansoor al Dayfi, in his mid 30s, was cleared for release by the inter-agency review panel in October. From 2010, he had been held as a “forever prisoner,” a captive considered too dangerous to release but ineligible for trial until the board downgraded his dangerousness.
It was the second Defense Department transfer disclosure in 20 hours. Earlier, the Pentagon said that a Yemeni was being resettled in Italy. Neither Italy nor Serbia had offered sanctuary to a Guantánamo prisoner before. Now, 27 of the last 76 captives are approved for transfer with security assurances that satisfy Secretary of Defense Ash Carter.
A Pentagon statement called Abdulayev by a different name, Muhammadi Davlatov. He was the last Tajik in the prison of now 14 nationalities and left the base with the other two before dawn Saturday.
“I’m delighted for him. It took way too long but it’s an enormous victory that he would get out of Guantánamo and he wouldn’t go to Tajikistan,” said Chicago attorney Matthew J. O’Hara, who seven years ago disclosed that Abdulayev feared repatriation more than spending the rest of his life in a Guantánamo cell.
Part of it was the stigma of having been at Guantánamo, he said. Part of it was fears that his family came out on the wrong side of that nation’s civil war.
Instead, O’Hara said the 37-year-old man who sports a long black ponytail wants to forge a career as a linguist or translator using the Arabic and English he learned in prison and the Tajik and Russian he learned before fleeing his homeland in 2001. He doesn’t speak Serbian but his attorney said “he’s a sponge” in his ability to pick up languages.
He also wants to marry and have children, he said.
Leaked prison records indicate that U.S. troops brought both men to the crude open-air prison compound called Camp X-Ray on Feb. 9, 2002, the eighth shipment of captives from Afghanistan. In all, 34 men were brought to Guantánamo that day to raise the total of war-on-terror captives to 220. Read more here
