Arab Legion

The Arab Legion is presented in Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s account through a brief exchange in detention, not through an institutional history. A guard explains its supposed responsibility as protecting the entire Arab world; Slahi’s response places that claim beside the prison and its officers, exposing the distance between a declared protective role and his experience of being detained.

Name and Stated Purpose

During the account of his processing at a detention facility, Slahi associates an officer with what he calls the Arab Legion. He later asks a guard why the group is called that. The guard answers that it is supposed to protect the entire Arab world. The passage supplies this explanation as the guard’s account of the name and purpose; it does not describe the organization’s structure, jurisdiction, or operations beyond the encounter.

The Detention Encounter

The exchange follows Slahi’s description of the prison’s commanding officer, who copied his identification details and, in Slahi’s account, worked at the facility day and night. Slahi also describes guards as rarely leaving the prison. The text does not establish that all these guards belonged to the Arab Legion: it reports the question to one guard and his answer, while an officer’s affiliation is partly obscured by redaction.

Protection and Irony

Slahi responds to the guard’s explanation with apparent sarcasm, imagining that the detainees would be well protected if the guards protected them from themselves. He invokes the saying, “Her protector is her assailant.” The organization’s name thus becomes part of the scene’s central contradiction: protection is declared as a broad public mission, while Slahi encounters the name in the constrained setting of his own detention. The passage offers that contrast through his perspective, without establishing a fuller account of the Arab Legion.