The United States has sent 11 Yemeni detainees at the Guantánamo Bay detention center to Oman, the Pentagon said on Monday, in a major resettlement that nearly halves the detention facility’s remaining number of prisoners.
The released men include Tawfiq al-Bihani, who had been cleared for transfer since 2010; Khalid Qassim, a long-term hunger striker who has spoken about spending most of his adult life in Guantánamo; and Hassan bin Attash, who was captured in a security raid in Pakistan in 2002.
His older brother, Walid bin Attash, remains detained and is a defendant in a military tribunal, accused of helping to plot the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the US.
None of the men in the latest transfer out of the camp had been criminally charged or put on trial during their two decades of detention. All were approved for transfer through federal national security officials.
The men had remained in detention despite being deemed by the US eligible for release for a number of years because they could not legally be returned to Yemen, which remains in the grip of a civil war and deemed by the US to be too unstable to rehabilitate such returnees.
Their release leaves just 15 prisoners at Guantánamo, the smallest number of detainees in the facility’s 22-year history. An estimated 780 people have passed through Guantánamo’s cells.
Recent weeks have seen a flurry of transfers as the Biden administration launches a last-ditch effort to shrink the prison’s population before president-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House.
Trump has previously vowed to keep Guantánamo open and “load it up with some bad dudes”. During his first term in office, he reversed an Obama administration policy to close it, which never happened, by signing an executive order explicitly to keep Guantánamo open.
“The United States appreciates the willingness of the government of Oman and other partners to support ongoing US efforts focused on responsibly reducing the detainee population and ultimately closing the Guantánamo Bay facility,” the US military said in a statement.
The facility, constructed on a US naval base in south-eastern Cuba following the “war on terror”, has drawn international condemnation throughout its existence since becoming a symbol of post-9/11 human rights abuses. Its critics have long highlighted concerns over indefinite detention without trial and controversial interrogation methods.
