Horst

The Afghan city discussed here enters Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s story through its proximity to a training camp where, in early 1991, he spent seven weeks preparing to join the insurgency against Afghanistan’s communist-led government. It was a brief stop in a life otherwise marked by study, return, and eventually a far longer journey through detention: its importance lies less in any documented action within the city itself than in the choice made at the camp nearby.

Setting and Training

Slahi had left Mauritania for Germany in 1988, the first member of his family to attend university and the first to travel by airplane. He pursued electrical engineering with the aim of working in telecommunications and computers. In early 1991, he interrupted those studies to take part in the Afghan insurgency, a cause then drawing young men from around the world. The account notes that such travel was openly undertaken and that Western governments, particularly the United States, actively supported the cause.

Joining the fight required preparation. Slahi attended the training camp near the city for seven weeks, received instruction in light arms and mortars, and swore a loyalty oath to al-Qaeda, the camp’s operators. The weapons and ammunition carried an unexpected detail: most of the guns were Soviet-made, while Slahi recalled at his 2004 Combatant Status Review hearing that the mortar shells had been made in the United States. The account places the camp within an international conflict whose equipment, participants, and political alliances did not fall into simple opposing categories.

Return and Changing Conflict

After training, Slahi returned to his studies in Germany. In early 1992, as Afghanistan’s communist government neared collapse, he went back to the country and joined a unit commanded by Jalaluddin Haqqani. The unit laid siege to Gardez, which fell with little resistance three weeks after Slahi arrived; Kabul fell soon afterward. These events belong to the wider Afghan journey, not to a documented episode in the city near the camp.

The political purpose of that journey soon changed in Slahi’s view. After the communist government’s collapse, the factions that had fought it began fighting one another for power. Slahi said he returned because he did not want to fight other Muslims and saw no reason to struggle over who would become president or vice-president. He described his original aim as opposing the communists, whom he said had forbidden his fellow Muslims from practicing their religion. The nearby training camp thus precedes a withdrawal from the cause as its military and political meaning shifted.

Place in the Larger Trajectory

The account does not describe the city as a later battlefield, a home, or a detention site. Its specific connection to Slahi is the camp nearby and the seven-week training that marked his first documented participation in the Afghan insurgency. Keeping that distinction matters: his subsequent return to Afghanistan and the fall of Gardez and Kabul broaden the historical setting, but do not establish further events in the city itself.

The episode also stands at a great distance from the detention odyssey that later came to dominate Slahi’s life. After leaving Canada for Senegal in January 2000, he was questioned and moved through a sequence of detentions that, over the next eighteen months, covered about twenty thousand miles and involved four countries. A week after he voluntarily reported to police in Mauritania in 2001, a CIA rendition flight took him to Jordan; he was later transferred through Bagram to Guantánamo. The city near the training camp is therefore an early point in a much larger biography, one in which a short period of military preparation is followed, years later, by an involuntary journey under American direction.