Abd al Malik, 41, a Yemeni, was despatched to resettle in a peaceable nation, Montenegro. He obtained a authorities stipend for a time after his launch in 2016, however that ran out. He tried to lift funds by selling artwork he made at Guantánamo, however made his final sale final 12 months. An ambition to work as a driver and information there by no means materialized because the tourism-dependent economic system tanked. And now he, his spouse and 20-year-old daughter are remoted and principally at house due to the coronavirus pandemic.
“I don’t know what I can do, particularly now with corona,” he mentioned not too long ago. “No work. Nothing.”
4 of these first 20 males, all launched by the Bush administration, couldn’t be discovered.
Gholam Ruhani, 46, and the brother-in-law of one of many Taliban’s negotiators, was returned house to Afghanistan in 2007, and that was the final his lawyer ever heard of him.
Feroz Abassi was despatched house to Britain in 2005, Omar Rajab Amin to Kuwait in 2006 and David Hicks to Australia in 2007. All have deliberately dropped out of sight.
Mr. Hicks, 45, an Australian drifter and convert to Islam, was captured in Afghanistan in 2001. The one different of the unique 20 to face prices past Mr. Bahlul, he went home after pleading guilty to offering materials assist for terrorism for serving as a Taliban foot soldier, a conviction that was overturned.
Ben Saul, a regulation faculty professor in Sydney, Australia, who in 2016 helped Mr. Hicks on a human rights case, mentioned the final he heard, Mr. Hicks was “working in panorama gardening, and had ongoing bodily and psychological well being points because of his remedy by the U.S. earlier than and at Gitmo.”
