Who Are the Five Afghans Released From Guantánamo?

By Andy Worthington, Andy Worthington's Blog. Posted May 11, 2008.

(Part II of Two)

For the five Afghans who returned home on the same flight as al-Jazeera journalist Sami al-Haj and the other three prisoners I recently described, the future is disturbingly uncertain. As I reported last December, when 13 of their compatriots were released from Guantánamo, they, like the other 19 Afghans released in August, September and November, were not freed outright, as was the case with the 152 other Afghans previously released, but were instead transferred to Block D, a wing of Pol-i-Charki, Kabul's main prison, which was recently refurbished by the U.S. authorities.

While some of these 32 men have subsequently been released from Pol-i-Charki, the whole story of U.S. involvement in the prison is deeply disturbing, as are reports that the "trials" of the men returned from Guantánamo are "closed-door" affairs, in which, as the Washington Post explained last month, "hey are often denied access to defense attorneys," and are, essentially, tried on the basis of "evidence" provided by the United States, which they are not allowed to see; in other words, exactly the same situation that they faced in the Combatant Status Review Tribunals at Guantánamo (the military reviews convened to assess the prisoners' status as "enemy combatants," in which military officers took the place of lawyers, and secret evidence was withheld from the prisoners).

As Mohammed Afzal Mullahkeil, a lawyer for the returned Afghan prisoners explained, "When they were sent from Guantánamo, they were told, 'You are innocent and you will be free once you're in your country.' When they got to Bagram, they just brought them to Block D and said they should have a second trial."

In common with previous Afghan releases, the identities of the five men have been difficult to establish. The Pentagon never discloses the names of those it frees, and although lawyers representing the prisoners are informed of their clients' departure, the identities of those who did not have legal representation -- either because they refused to do so, or had not found any way of establishing contact with the legal community -- remain unknown unless the media are present on their arrival (which has not happened in Afghanistan for many years), or until further investigation by lawyers or journalists turn up details of their identities.

Shortly after the men were released, the identities of only two of the five Afghans had been established, but over the weekend Sami al-Haj gave the names of the other three men, all of whom have now been positively identified. As with those described above, their stories reveal, yet again, the wholesale mockery of justice that defines the regime at Guantánamo: outright failures of intelligence, the presumption of guilt, the refusal to seek out witnesses to back up the prisoners’ stories, and a willingness to accept confessions from other prisoners as the truth, regardless of how it was obtained, and with no attempt made to investigate the veracity of the claims.

Haji Rohullah Wakil, a celebrated anti-Taliban commander

Of the two Afghans identified, by far the most significant is 46-year old Haji Rohullah Wakil (also identified as Haji Roohullah), a tribal leader in Afghanistan's Kunar province, whose opposition to the Taliban was such that he fired the first salvo against the Taliban in Kunar after the U.S.-led invasion in October 2001. As a result of his anti-Taliban credentials and his support for Hamid Karzai, Wakil was rewarded with an important position in the province's post-Taliban administration, and was also made a member of the Loya Jirga, the prestigious gathering of tribal leaders that elected Karzai as President in June 2002. His influence was such that Ghulam Ullah, the head of education in Kunar, described him as "a national religious leader."

Seized by U.S. forces in August 2002, with his military commander Sabar Lal and eleven others, Wakil was taken to the U.S. prison in Bagram airbase for questioning. Although the others were subsequently released, the Americans decided that both Wakil and Lal had sufficient intelligence value to be transferred to Guantánamo in August 2003. According to an Associated Press report, they believed that Wakil "had strong links with Middle Eastern fighters in Afghanistan, particularly Saudi Arabians like Osama bin Laden," and thought it significant that he was a follower of the Wahhabi sect of Islam, even though both Wakil and Lal had had numerous meetings with senior American officials and had offered support for the campaign to oust al-Qaeda and the Taliban from the Tora Bora mountains in November and December 2001.

The outline of Wakil’s story has been reported before -- both in my book, and in an article I wrote last October, when his military commander, Sabar Lal, was released from Guantánamo -- but it still appears to be a disturbing example of the incompetence of American military intelligence in Afghanistan, as the primary charge against Wakil -- that he provided sanctuary to a number of significant al-Qaeda operatives who had fled from the city of Jalalabad after it fell to the Northern Alliance on November 12, 2001 -- was so utterly at odds with his proven track record as an anti-Taliban tribal leader who was part of the Northern Alliance and supported Hamid Karzai.

See more stories tagged with: guantánamo, the guantánamo files, taliban, afghanistan, sami al-haj, haji rohullah wakil, sabar lal, abdullah mohammed khan

Andy Worthington is a writer and historian, and author of The Guantánamo Files.

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