NEFA Report - "'The Eleven': Saudi Guantanamo Veterans Returning to the Fight"

By Evan Kohlmann

The NEFA Foundation has released a new report I have written titled, “The Eleven: Saudi Guantanamo Veterans Returning to the Fight.” The report includes in-depth profiles of eleven former Saudi detainees in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, who are now listed on the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s roster of its 85 “most wanted” terrorist suspects: Saeed Ali Jabir al-Kathim al-Shehri (a.k.a. “Abu Sufyan”, “Abu Asma”); Yusuf Muhammad Mubarak al-Jebairy al-Shehri; Jabir Jubran Ali al-Faify (a.k.a. “Abu Ibrahim, “Abu Jaffar al-Ansari”); Fahd Saleh Suleiman al-Jutayli (a.k.a. “Hamza Aqeedah”); Mohammed Ateeq Owaid al-Awfi al-Harbi (a.k.a. “Abul-Hareth Mohammed al-Awfi”); Murtadha Ali Saeed Magram (a.k.a. “Abul-Baraa al-Hadrami”); Meshal Mohammed Rashid Al-Shedoky (a.k.a. Mishale Ashadouki); Adnan Muhammad Ali al-Sayegh; Ibrahim Sulaiman Mohammed ar-Rubaish (a.k.a. “Abu Mohammed”); Turki Meshawi Zayid al-Assiri (a.k.a. “Al-Mutasim al-Makki”); and, Othman Bin Ahmed Bin Othman al-Ghamdi (a.k.a. Othman al-Omairah). The NEFA report notes, “whether we speak of Jabir al-Faify, Fahd al-Jutayli, Murtadha Magram, Ibrahim ar-Rabeish, Turki al-Assiri, or Othman al-Ghamdi, their stories are remarkably familiar… Yet, for all the brimming confidence in their “Afghan” credentials, the detailed accounts of these men offer credible reasons to doubt their actual military capabilities… These men now face somewhat of a daunting challenge to prove their military capabilities in the face of their relatively young age and their lack of sustained frontline combat experience… In fact, the major distinction between men like al-Shehri and al-Harbi versus previous generations of Al-Qaida leadership in Saudi Arabia is that they have chosen to launch their operations from a lawless Bedouin-style sanctuary just beyond Saudi borders in Yemen—instead of the risky urban warfare model adopted by Abdelaziz al-Muqrin and his contemporaries… It remains to be seen whether the intriguing decision to move the central Al-Qaida leadership beyond the reach of the Saudi Interior Ministry—and away from urban areas tightly packed with Muslim civilians—will have a significant long-term strategic impact in terms of addressing the group’s litany of setbacks.”

The report also warns of the “dangers of insufficiently vetting Guantanamo veterans for a release back to their countries of origin, and the foolishness of allowing diplomatic courtesies and issues of political expediency to trump the assessments of professionals who have deemed these men to represent a continuing threat to the United States and its allies":

In at least four of the eleven cases-Fahd al-Jutayli, Murtadha Magram, Adnan al-Sayegh, and Ibrahim ar-Rabeish-ARB panels in Guantanamo Bay specifically found that the men continued to represent "a threat to the United States and its allies" only months prior to their transfer from custody in Gitmo back home to Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, it is almost inexplicable that the U.S. government would even consider releasing, albeit, a mid-ranking Afghan-trained Al-Qaida recruit such as Yusuf al-Shehri-who has happily advertised to his interrogators that "he considers all Americans his enemy" and that "he will continue to fight them until he dies"-except under the most stringent of conditions. Or, alternatively, we have the case of Murtadha Magram-who boasted that had gone "to the jihad to die", that he "wanted to be a martyr for the cause", and that he "hates Americans and all non-believers." These hardly sound like obvious choices for early parole from Guantanamo... In at least one regrettable instance, if the account of the New York Times is to be believed, a terror suspect now thought to be quite dangerous (Mishal al-Shedoky) was released and sent home to Saudi Arabia from Guantanamo, primarily in order to help win Saudi political support for the botched U.S. invasion of Iraq.