Abu Hafs

Abu Hafs, whose full name was Mahfouz Ould al-Walid and who was also known as Abu Hafs al-Mauritani, was a prominent member of al-Qaeda’s Shura Council and a senior theological adviser to Osama bin Laden. In Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s story, he is both a consequential figure in al-Qaeda’s leadership and a relative whose family ties and practical assistance connected him to Slahi’s life in Germany. Those facts establish a real association, but do not by themselves establish that Slahi shared Abu Hafs’s aims or activities.

Identity and Family Connection

Abu Hafs was Slahi’s distant cousin. He was also Slahi’s former brother-in-law: Abu Hafs had married the sister of Slahi’s former wife. The connection therefore ran through both extended kinship and marriage, placing Abu Hafs within a family network rather than making him simply an outside political contact.

That network had practical as well as genealogical dimensions. While Slahi was living in Germany, he and Abu Hafs spoke by telephone occasionally. On two occasions, Slahi helped transfer $4,000 to Abu Hafs’s family in Mauritania around the Ramadan fasting month holidays. The account describes these as family remittances; it gives no basis for treating the transfers as support for al-Qaeda.

Position and Reported Views

During the 1990s and until the September 11 attacks, Abu Hafs was a prominent member of al-Qaeda’s Shura Council, its main advisory body, and one of Osama bin Laden’s senior theological advisers. His standing made the association significant to investigators examining Slahi’s contacts, but the text also records a distinction between Abu Hafs’s position and his reported views on the attacks.

It had been widely reported that Abu Hafs opposed the September 11 attacks. The 9/11 Commission recorded a report that he had sent Osama bin Laden a message grounding his opposition in the Qur’an. This account does not erase Abu Hafs’s senior role in al-Qaeda; it complicates the assumption that membership in its leadership necessarily meant agreement with those attacks.

Scrutiny of the Association

A call from Abu Hafs to Slahi in Germany in 1999, made using Osama bin Laden’s satellite phone, drew the attention of German intelligence. The episode shows how a family relationship and occasional communication could also become security evidence, especially when the means of contact linked the call to a prominent al-Qaeda leader.

Abu Hafs himself was wanted in connection with al-Qaeda attacks in the 1990s. The annotation reports a $5 million reward associated with him under the FBI’s Rewards for Justice Program; it also notes that rewards for senior al-Qaeda figures rose to $25 million after the September 11 attacks. These details help explain why Abu Hafs’s name carried exceptional weight in accounts of Slahi’s relationships. They do not, on their own, resolve what Slahi knew or intended.

Departure and Later Fate

After the September 11 attacks, Abu Hafs left Afghanistan and spent the following decade under house arrest in Iran. In April 2012, he was extradited to Mauritania, held briefly, and then released. At the time described in the annotation, he was a free man.

The account of Abu Hafs is assembled partly through editorial notes around the manuscript. Those notes draw on public records and contextual reading, but explicitly do not claim to reconstruct redacted text or reveal classified material. The distinction matters: the book documents kinship, contact, transfers, political prominence, and later events, while leaving the redactions—and any unsupported conclusions they might invite—unresolved.