Dakar

Dakar is the first place in Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s account where an anticipated return home becomes an arrest and a forced transfer. He chose the Senegalese city as a cheaper gateway to Mauritania, expecting his family to meet him there. Instead, the airport arrival ended with Slahi and his companions in custody; later, a small plane carried him from Dakar to Mauritania. In the book’s larger account of detention, the city marks the threshold between an ordinary journey home and a prolonged sequence of questioning, concealment, and transfer.

A cheaper route home

Slahi flew from Montreal to Brussels and then onward to Dakar on January 21, 2000. Dakar was not his intended destination in itself: a direct flight to Nouakchott, Mauritania, cost considerably more. The two cities were about 300 miles apart, and Slahi had arranged for family members to collect him in Dakar and take him onward. For him, this was a familiar practical choice, not a suspicious detour; people made the journey that way regularly.

The book frames the flight as the beginning of the odyssey that would become Guantánamo Diary. In retrospect, Dakar is therefore both a real destination and a narrative dividing line. The trip began as a homecoming, but from this point Slahi’s fate would be shaped by a sequence of detentions and interrogations involving several countries and, at different stages, American participation. Dakar was the first stop in that much larger geography of custody, not the place where the journey was meant to end.

Arrival and arrest

The flight to Dakar took about five hours and arrived at around 11 p.m. Airport formalities lasted approximately half an hour. After collecting his bag, Slahi said goodbye to a fellow traveler; when he turned away, he saw one of his brothers smiling at him. Another brother and two friends were there as well. The reunion was brief. As the group crossed the road toward the parking area, Slahi’s hands were shackled behind his back and armed men surrounded him, cutting him off from his companions. At first he mistook the sudden seizure for a robbery; an agent then announced that he was being arrested in the name of the law.

Slahi called out to his brothers, unsure whether they could hear him. They had heard, and one later teased him for calling for help. Only afterward did he learn that the arrest had taken in the entire party: both brothers and the two friends accompanying them. One friend had traveled with the brothers from Nouakchott; the other lived in Dakar and had happened to ride to the airport with them. The group was treated as a gang. The accidental presence of the local friend gives the airport pickup a particular consequence: the operation swept in not only its intended detainee but also the people who had come to meet him.

From police custody to the airport

Dakar also became the setting for Slahi’s departure from Senegal in official custody. After leaving the police commissariat, he was driven in a Mitsubishi SUV toward the airport. He sat between an inspector and a guard, while the lead interrogator rode in front; the driver spoke French with a heavy accent and did not address him. Slahi kept reading his Quran silently. He noted that Senegalese officers had not confiscated it, unlike officials in Mauritania, Jordan, and the United States.

At the airport, the group used the diplomatic passage rather than ordinary civilian procedures. The American man and the interrogator displayed badges as they moved through the terminal, while a Senegalese officer took Slahi’s passport away to have it stamped. Slahi had expected to board the scheduled Air Afrique flight to Nouakchott. Instead, the group walked to the runway and found a small white plane already running its engines. The American man spoke briefly with the pilot before the passengers were told to board. The contrast between a routine passport stamp and a private aircraft departing outside the ordinary passenger process made the change in Slahi’s status concrete: he was no longer traveling by the arrangements he had made for himself.

The plane was cramped enough that four people could barely fit inside. Slahi and a large guard squeezed into the rear, bent forward and crowded together, while the inspector had a somewhat better seat. The pilot was a French woman; during the trip she spoke with the inspector. Slahi later learned that she had told friends in Nouakchott about the secret package she had delivered from Dakar. Before departure, the interrogator and the American waited to make sure the plane had taken off. The pilot described the route as only 300 miles, with a flight time of roughly 45 minutes to an hour depending on the wind. Dakar’s position close to Nouakchott made the transfer short in distance, but the manner of travel made it a consequential border crossing.

The city as a transfer point

Slahi’s recollection distinguishes the public airport from the hidden movement carried out through it. The terminal was quiet, the waiting room empty, and his passport was stamped; yet the ordinary flight he expected had been replaced by a small, private plane. The diplomatic passage and displayed badges enabled the group to bypass civilian formalities. Slahi interpreted this scene as evidence that Senegal lacked sovereignty in the operation, describing the display of official authority as a continuation of colonial power. That judgment belongs to his account of what he witnessed: the unequal control over movement was visible to him in who could pass through the airport, arrange the aircraft, and decide where he would go.

The flight from Dakar began the concealed sequence that left Slahi’s family believing for almost a year that he was being held in Mauritania. His relatives delivered clothes and money to a prison there, unaware that he had already been transferred to Jordan, then to Bagram in Afghanistan, and onward to Guantánamo. Dakar is not presented as the site of those later detentions; its significance is that it marks the first forced passage in the route. The city’s anticipated role as a convenient meeting place for a family journey was overturned, and its airport became the point from which Slahi was carried into a system of custody whose destinations his family could not see.