The US has repatriated a detainee from its military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba to Tunisia, the Pentagon announced Monday. Ridah Bin Saleh al-Yazidi, 59, was determined to be eligible for transfer after a “rigorous interagency review process,” more than 22 years after he was first brought to the facility. He was never charged with a crime and had been cleared for transfer since 2007.
Yazidi, a Tunisian national, had been incarcerated at Guantanamo since the day it opened on January 11, 2002. According to a 2007 US military assessment, he was accused of being a member of the militant group al Qaeda. However, human rights groups have long been critical of those assessments, arguing they have often proven unreliable.
Yazidi’s transfer is the fourth this month, bringing the total number of detainees remaining at Guantanamo Bay to 26. Of those, 14 are eligible to be transferred out. The facility was originally opened in 2002 as a place where suspects in the war on terror could be interrogated, but prisoners have been indefinitely detained, and the detention facility has become an international symbol of US rights abuses in the post-9/11 era.
President Joe Biden has made it an early goal of his administration to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, but the US has made only marginal progress in moving the prisoners held there over the last four years. The facility held about 40 detainees at the start of the Biden administration.
