Abd al Malik, 41, a Yemeni, was sent to resettle in a peaceful nation, Montenegro. He received a government grant for a while after his release in 2016, but it ended. He tried to raise funds by selling works of art he made at Guantánamo, but made his last sale last year. The ambition to work as a driver and guide never materialized, as the tourism-dependent economy plummeted. And now he, his wife and 20-year-old daughter are isolated and almost everyone at home because of the coronavirus pandemic.
“I don’t know what I can do, especially now with the corona,” he said recently. “Jobless. Nothing.”
Four of the first 20 men, all released by the Bush administration, were not found.
Gholam Ruhani, 46, and the brother-in-law of one of the Taliban negotiators, returned home to Afghanistan in 2007 and was the last time his lawyer heard of him.
Feroz Abassi was sent home to Britain in 2005, Omar Rajab Amin to Kuwait in 2006 and David Hicks to Australia in 2007. They all disappeared from view intentionally.
Hicks, 45, an Australian bum converted to Islam, was captured in Afghanistan in 2001. The only other one of the 20 originals to face charges besides Bahlul, he returned home after pleading guilty to providing material support for terrorism by serving as a soldier Taliban infantry, a conviction that has been overturned.
Ben Saul, a professor at the law school in Sydney, Australia, who in 2016 helped Mr. Hicks in a human rights case, said that the last time he heard, Mr. Hicks was “working in landscape gardening and had problems ongoing physical and mental health as a result of their treatment by the US before and at Gitmo. ”