The Pentagon on Monday repatriated a Tunisian detainee who was brought to the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, 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 Defense 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.
Mr. 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, meaning the White House will once again fail to achieve President Barack Obama’s ambition of closing the prison. As the prison enters its 24th year in January, its mission has become more focused on discrete military trials than the prisoner-of-war-style operation that held and interrogated hundreds of wartime detainees in the early years.
Mr. 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 Guantánamo 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 Guantánamo’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.
According to a leaked 2007 prison assessment, Pakistani forces captured Mr. Yazidi near the border with Afghanistan in December 2001 in a group of about 30 men who were believed to have fled the battle of Tora Bora. Some of them were suspected of being Bin Laden bodyguards and so were of particular interest in the early efforts to locate the Qaeda leader.
It described him as a dangerous detainee who was hostile to the Guantánamo guard force and was written up for defacing a library book and throwing a cup of tea at a U.S. soldier.
But by 2010, an Obama administration task force listed him among dozens of prisoners who could not be prosecuted for war crimes and were eligible for release to the custody of another country, with security assurances.
Mr. Yazidi’s case defied U.S. diplomats’ efforts to transfer him for years. Ian Moss, who spent a decade at the State Department arranging prisoner and detainee transfers, said Mr. Yazidi did not leave earlier because Tunisia was deemed too dangerous or uninterested in taking him and Mr. Yazidi was unwilling to meet with other countries that might have resettled him.
“He could have been gone a while ago but for Tunisian foot-dragging,” Mr. Moss said on Monday.
Little is known about Mr. Yazidi beyond information contained in leaked U.S. intelligence documents, which say he spent time in Italy in the 1980s and 1990s and was arrested and imprisoned for involvement with illegal drugs. From Italy he found his way to Afghanistan in 1999, where, an intelligence profile said, he attended a training camp for jihadists.
It also is not known what family awaits him in Tunisia, and he has apparently not seen a lawyer in nearly 20 years.
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