Jihad

Jihad in the memoir is both a remembered political commitment and a contested label: Mohamedou Ould Slahi describes traveling to Afghanistan to help Afghans fighting communism, then finds those trips treated in later interrogations as grounds for suspicion. The dispute turns on who may define the meaning of that history—Slahi, the Mauritanian authorities, or the United States—and on whether past participation in a foreign conflict can be made to stand in for evidence of a crime.

The Afghan trips

Slahi recounts two journeys to Afghanistan, in January 1991 and February 1992, during the war against communism. He says that he legally traveled there and returned, and that after the war he resumed his ordinary life without violating Mauritanian or German law. In his account, assisting his Afghan brothers belonged to a particular conflict and period; it did not make his later conduct criminal.

That distinction informs his comparison between governments. He portrays Mauritania as concerned with whether someone causes trouble inside the country, rather than treating a journey to Afghanistan as inherently incriminating. By contrast, he says the United States regarded travel to Afghanistan, Bosnia, or Chechnya as a reason to watch someone for the rest of his life and try to imprison him. The same past journey thus carries sharply different meanings depending on the authority interpreting it.

Jihad under interrogation

When Mauritanian interrogators questioned Slahi, they asked about his Afghanistan trips, showed him photographs, and also pressed him about Canada. Slahi says he answered truthfully about Canada and the photographs but deliberately withheld parts of his Afghan history. He explains that he considered his actions in that war outside the United States’ proper concern, particularly because, as he understood it, the United States had been on the same side against communism. He also emphasizes that he was not a United States citizen and had never been in the country, and argues that he had broken no law by traveling to Afghanistan and returning.

The withholding did not help him. Slahi later says the interrogators concluded that he was not truthful, while he believed the gap in his account made him look guilty. He describes trying to fill it by repeating the story of his 1991 and early 1992 trips, but says the Mauritanian interrogator was not impressed: in Slahi’s telling, the trip itself was not the issue so long as he had not caused trouble at home. The questioning therefore made the same history serve two purposes at once: it was the explanation Slahi offered for his past and a source of suspicion that he felt compelled to explain more fully.

A changing political meaning

Slahi’s account distinguishes between the historical setting of the Afghan war and the later American security framework. He presents participation in the earlier conflict as lawful and politically intelligible at the time, while describing the United States’ subsequent attention to travel in Afghanistan and other conflict zones as open-ended scrutiny. His complaint is not simply that officials asked about Jihad; it is that a past journey could be treated as a lasting basis for detention without, in his view, a corresponding showing that he had committed a crime.

The memoir also records how this dispute crossed national boundaries. Slahi says that his brief stay in Canada attracted more American attention than twelve years living in Germany, where, he notes, no incriminating information about him was provided. He describes Canadian information being interpreted by Mauritanian and United States authorities in ways that confirmed their theory that he was the mastermind of the Millennium Plot. Against that later suspicion, his account of Jihad becomes part of a larger argument about how prior travel and associations were made to support a conclusion already under investigation.

The account’s limits and form

These claims reach the reader through a memoir composed under severe constraints. Slahi wrote the 466-page manuscript by hand in his Guantánamo cell in 2005, in English, his fourth language, and the United States government added more than 2,500 redactions before publication. The editor describes the manuscript as fragmentary and notes that Slahi could not participate in or respond to either stage of editing. The published account therefore gives a detailed record of how Slahi understood and narrated the meaning of his Afghan journeys, while censorship and editorial mediation remain part of the conditions under which that account is read.

The term’s importance in the memoir lies in this collision of meanings. For Slahi, his Afghan journeys belong to a past war and do not, by themselves, establish criminal conduct; in the interrogations he recounts, they become material for a continuing security suspicion. Jihad is thus not presented as a settled label but as a point of conflict over history, law, and the power to turn a person’s past into evidence against him.