The Pentagon on Monday repatriated a Tunisian detainee who was brought to the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, the day it opened, was never charged at the war court and was approved for transfer more than a decade ago. Ridah Bin Saleh al Yazidi, 59, spent years languishing at the wartime prison because deals could not be made to repatriate or resettle him.
He was airlifted from the base in a secret operation that was completed 11 months after the defence department notified Congress that it had reached an agreement to return him to Tunisian custody, the Pentagon said. It offered no details on the security arrangements surrounding his return.
Yazidi’s transfer was the fourth in two weeks in a late Biden administration push to reduce the detainee population at the prison, which held 40 prisoners when President Biden took office. His departure left 26 detainees, 14 of them approved for transfer to other countries with diplomatic and security arrangements. Another nine are in pretrial proceedings or convicted of war crimes. The prison enters its 24th year in Jan.
Yazidi was the last of a dozen Tunisians once held at the prison, most of whom were captured in Afghanistan or Pakistan after the Sept 11 attacks and brought to Guantanamo Bay as terrorism suspects. He was sent to the wartime prison the day it opened, Jan 11, 2002, and so was photographed kneeling anonymously in a crude open-air compound at Guantanamo’s Camp X-Ray in one of the detention operation’s most iconic photos.
With his transfer, only one other person among those original 20 detainees is still held at the prison: Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, who is serving a life sentence for conspiring to commit war crimes as a media adviser to Osama bin Laden. nyt
