The 2001 transfer of Mohamedou Ould Slahi from Mauritania to Jordan turned a supposedly temporary interrogation into a secret cross-border detention. On Mauritania’s Independence Day, Slahi was handed over to Jordanian custody without his family being told where he was going; assurances that he would soon return proved baseless. The episode made sovereignty and family knowledge more than abstractions: the state celebrated its independence while one of its citizens was removed from its territory, and his relatives continued to believe he remained in a local prison.

From questioning to transfer

Slahi had spent seven days in Mauritanian custody, isolated from his family and unaware of where he might be taken. He had become seriously ill and was struggling to eat. On the eighth day, November 28, he learned that he would be sent to Jordan. The date gave the transfer its central political irony: it coincided with Mauritania’s Independence Day, commemorating independence from France in 1960. Slahi regarded the handover as a violation of the country’s sovereignty and constitution, which he understood to forbid extraditing Mauritanian citizens. His account emphasizes the contradiction between a public commemoration of national independence and a secret arrangement that removed him from the country.

The transfer followed a multilateral deal involving Mauritania, the United States, and Jordan. On the night before it was completed, guards let Slahi watch the Independence Day parade approaching the Presidential Palace. The schoolboys carrying candles and the bands recalled his own participation in the parade as a child, nineteen years earlier. That memory set his childhood sense of national belonging beside his present uncertainty about whether his country could protect its own citizens. The next morning, despite the holiday and his poor health, the head of the Mauritanian State Security Directorate came to see him. Slahi initially thought the unexpected visit might mean release; instead, he was told he was going to Jordan.

Promises and preparations

Slahi asked when he would come back. The head of the Mauritanian State Security Directorate tried several times to reach his superior, who could give no precise return date but assured him it would be a matter of days. The official then offered a simple calculation: two days for questioning and one for travel. Slahi records that he did not know for certain what the Americans intended, but believed they had asked for his transfer to Jordan as the beginning of further negotiations. The gap between the confident timetable and the absence of a definite return date made the promise precarious from the outset.

Before departure, Slahi was given inexpensive clothes and a bag. The suit did not fit his weakened frame, but he accepted it because the important question, as he saw it, was not how he looked. At the aircraft, the Mauritanian official handed the Jordanian representative Slahi’s passport and a thin folder. Two young guards were to accompany him on the eleven-hour journey. Unable to communicate easily with one another across their Arabic dialects, the Mauritanian and Jordanian officials relied on Slahi to interpret a request for fuel. He then used his linguistic advantage to ask the Mauritanian official to tell the Jordanian not to mistreat him. The response was a general request that he be treated appropriately, not a guarantee about what awaited him.

Arrival in Jordan

The small aircraft landed near Amman after the long flight. Slahi briefly thought the removal of his handcuffs meant that the journey had ended without further difficulty; the guards restrained him again and covered his head before taking him from the plane. He was weak after days of poor nutrition, and his clothing slipped as he was led down from the aircraft. The arrival therefore overturned the limited reassurance he had drawn from the end of the flight: reaching Jordan did not mean that he was free, or that the promised return was close.

The transfer also began a period of detention concealed from the people who might have sought him. Slahi’s family was not permitted to visit him in Mauritania and was not told his whereabouts. His eldest brother, Hamoud, continued to visit the security prison with clean clothes and money for his meals, unaware that Slahi had already been taken abroad. For almost a year, the family believed he was in Mauritanian custody; prison officials accepted money for his upkeep without revealing that he was no longer there. The journey to Jordan thus separated Slahi not only from his country but from reliable information about his fate.

Concealment and consequences

The transfer was one stage in a larger detention route. A week after Slahi had turned himself in, a CIA rendition flight had taken him to Jordan; months later, the United States moved him from Amman to Bagram Air Base, and then to Guantánamo. The eventual route crossed several countries and covered thousands of miles, while his family continued paying for him as though he were held in Nouakchott. Only when Yahdih, his youngest brother, read a report in Der Spiegel on October 28, 2002, did the family learn that Slahi was in Guantánamo.

The secrecy extended into the Jordanian prison. A rule sheet that Slahi found stated that International Committee of the Red Cross visits occurred every fourteen days, but he later understood that he was repeatedly moved to a cellar to hide him during those visits. The concealment lasted throughout his eight months in Jordan. In this chronology, the transfer is not an isolated change of location: it inaugurates a system in which movement, family contact, and outside access are controlled together. The official prediction that the trip would last only days stands against the prolonged detention that followed, while the Independence Day setting sharpens the contrast between national independence as ceremony and Slahi’s inability to know, choose, or communicate where he was being held.