Slahi's transfer from Jordan to Bagram

The transfer of Mohamedou Ould Slahi from Jordan to the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan marked a new stage in his secret detention: after months in an Amman prison, he was moved by a Central Intelligence Agency rendition aircraft into U.S. military custody. The journey’s uncertainty is central to the episode. Slahi could infer fragments of where he was being taken, but could not see the route or reliably identify the places through which he passed. In Guantánamo Diary, this scene begins the account of the detention journey that would carry him across countries and far from his family.

Background and Transfer

Slahi had been held and interrogated by Jordanian intelligence services in Amman for seven and a half months. On July 19, 2002, another Central Intelligence Agency rendition aircraft retrieved him from the city and flew him toward the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. He was blindfolded and shackled for the transfer, with his clothing and treatment arranged by the escort team. The journey was not presented to him as a lawful, visible passage between named institutions; he had to piece together its direction from limited clues.

The flight lasted several hours before the aircraft landed. Slahi initially understood the journey as a direct flight to the United States, but the landing made clear that the destination was still farther away. He inferred that the plane had stopped at Ramstein, Germany, because he associated the place with a U.S. military airport used by transiting aircraft. That was his interpretation, not information given to him by his captors. The distinction matters: the account records both the transfer route as later established and the uncertainty in which Slahi experienced it.

A Route Read Through Fragments

After the aircraft landed, the guards changed his metal restraints for plastic ones for the short walk to a helicopter. A guard tapped him on the shoulder in a gesture he took as reassurance. Even amid the enforced movement and lack of explanation, the small gesture briefly suggested to him that some people involved might still treat him humanely. The helicopter ride and a short truck journey followed. With his sight restricted and no reliable explanation of the route, he tried to make sense of unfamiliar voices and surroundings by comparing them with places he knew or had heard about.

Those guesses shifted as the journey unfolded. Germany seemed plausible to him because of the landing and his knowledge of its legal system; later, he speculated that the truck’s occupants might be speaking a language associated with the Philippines. Neither inference established his actual destination. The timeline identifies the transfer as ending at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, while Slahi’s account preserves the disorientation of being moved without knowing where he was. His effort to imagine a judge, a legal process, or a temporary jail shows how he attempted to place the journey inside familiar systems even when the transfer itself gave him no assurance that those expectations would be met.

Arrival and Processing

At the end of the truck ride, guards brought Slahi into a hall and ordered him to remain in a fixed position. After roughly fifteen minutes, he was taken to a room used to process detainees. There the escort removed the equipment from his head, and personnel conducted a brief medical check before he was dressed in Afghan clothing. His hands and feet remained restrained, and mittens were placed on his hands. The sequence turned an uncertain journey into formal intake: he was no longer simply being transported, but entered a system that recorded and controlled his presence.

The arrival did not immediately dispel his confusion about the location. The Afghan clothing seemed to him inconsistent with the Philippines, one of the places he had imagined during the truck ride. He began reciting a crisis prayer quietly; no one stopped him at that moment, although one military police officer watched him with hostility. These details show how even basic acts and objects—clothing, restraints, the prayer he could still recite—became clues through which he assessed the conditions around him. The account identifies Bagram as the destination, but does not turn Slahi’s incomplete knowledge during the transfer into certainty he did not possess then.

Consequences and Significance

The transfer was one stage in a longer sequence: after about two weeks of interrogation at Bagram, Slahi was placed on a military transport with thirty-four other prisoners and flown to Guantánamo, where the group arrived on August 5, 2002. His removal from Jordan therefore did not end his detention or bring him before a court; it carried him onward into another custodial setting. In the wider journey described in the book, these successive movements formed part of an eighteen-month passage through four countries, often involving American personnel and undertaken at the behest of the United States.

The movement also took place while Slahi’s family was being kept in the dark about his whereabouts. They believed for almost a year that he remained in Mauritanian custody. His oldest brother, Hamoud, regularly delivered clothes and money for his upkeep at a security prison, although Slahi had already been moved through Jordan and onward to Bagram. The concealment made the transfer consequential beyond the aircraft and detention facilities: it separated Slahi from his family while allowing officials to sustain a false account of where he was being held. The opening scene of Guantánamo Diary thus makes the transfer both a physical passage and the beginning of a narrative about restricted movement, missing information, and detention conducted beyond the family’s view.