MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay — A megaphone-blaring salesman rattled past the house, and the man the U.S. military once called a “high threat” member of al-Qaeda’s global terrorism network put his fingers in his ears and grimaced.
“What is that noise?” he asked. “It happens all the time.”
It has been three months since Jihad Ahmed Mustafa Dhiab and five other former Guantanamo Bay prisoners moved into a four-bedroom house in Uruguay’s seaside capital, and the surroundings are still bewildering.
Dhiab is a Syrian, and he spent 12 years in Guantanamo. Now he lives in Montevideo with three other Syrians, a Palestinian and a Tunisian, all former prisoners at the U.S. detention facility in Cuba.
They were all detained in 2002 and accused of being hardened al-Qaeda militants, people who allegedly forged documents, trained as suicide bombers, fought at Tora Bora. Some knew each other before their capture, and others met in Guantanamo. In 2009, they were cleared for release, but congressional opposition to transferring detainees, let alone closing the penal colony, stalled the process until last year.
In a week’s worth of long and candid conversations, he acknowledged that the transition to life in a Latin American capital has not been easy.
The first days of feel-good images — the spruced-up men waving from their balcony, welcoming neighbors bringing gifts of yerba mate — have given way to a more uncomfortable limbo.
It has been hardest on Dhiab. The marks of a dozen years in a cell and the hunger strikes he held there show in his gaunt 43-year-old frame, his beard flecked with gray. He hobbles on crutches, still wearing the Army green T-shirt and sweat pants given to him in Guantanamo. The infamous orange uniform — a Bob Barker brand 65-35 poly-cotton blend made in El Salvador — hangs in his closet for safekeeping.
While free — in theory — to leave Uruguay, the men do not yet have passports.
Dhiab hardly ever goes outside now. He said he feels the promises made to him have been betrayed. He wants his own house, his family brought from Syria, and enough money to live with dignity and start a business.
He demands that the United States own up to its responsibility for having imprisoned him without charge for more than a decade, finally releasing him with a letter from the State Department saying there was no information that he or any of the other men had any role in “conducting or facilitating terrorist activities.”
And so, Dhiab has returned to exercising the one right he had in Guantanamo: to refuse.
He no longer accepts the $600-per-month stipend from the Uruguayan government. He has stopped having regular hospital visits despite a long list of health troubles. He has no income, phone or job prospects. He predicts that the tomatoes, cucumbers and potatoes he nibbles might last a couple more weeks, and when they’re gone, he plans to start a hunger strike in front of the U.S. Embassy.
He is grateful to Uruguay for accepting him but feels the U.S. needs to provide for his well-being. “Who is to blame for my wife and I living in hell?” he asked. “America.”
