23 December 2022 — I was contacted by Sofiane Berhoumi, a former political prisoner, illegally held at Guantanamo Bay military prison camp for nearly 20 years, finally freed to his native home of Algeria in April 2022. It was a Friday evening. We spoke over the phone for what seemed like more than an hour. He reflected on the emotions of what being freed was like. The challenges of rebuilding his future. Making a living. Beginning a family.
Yet, two years on, the exact details of our conversation from that night have become blurred. Faded. Melted into the past. Thinking back, I could still see myself sitting near the edge of my living room sofa, pacing back and forth, shuffling around a few titles on the bookshelf, and quenching my thirst with a glass of water. But it was a contextual memory, a vague remembrance of the events.
What I still have a clear recollection of, however, is the impression the conversation left on me. He spoke like a man not broken by his unjust captivity. And even after two decades stripped of freedom, no trace of resentment was evident in his voice. Nothing of the bitterness that oppression and exile carves into men. Not even for the American and Pakistani states who had cast him into bondage. I never thought it was possible that someone could bury resentment so deeply.
In view of that exchange, I wrote in a journal entry at the time,
Like many others who have suffered a similar fate, Berhoumi will undoubtedly struggle to rehabilitate himself back into a dysfunctional ruling class society, where socioeconomic opportunities are absurdly hard to come by.”
It was a half-hearted attempt to document the moment, rather than a true effort to write something worth telling. Over time, my thoughts evolved into something that genuinely reflected the subject.
Sofiane Berhoumi was born in 1973 to a lower middle-class Algiers family. His father, Muhammad Berhoumi (1941-2004), was a self-employed lawyer, and his mother, Baya Arabi, a French-educated full-time mother. The second oldest child in a six-sibling household, it was a happy upbringing. Family outings marked the best days of his childhood, in a home of equal responsibility, evident in the manner mother and father shared the task of driving. Seniority guaranteed Berhoumi a seat by the window with every car ride. The sibling elbows and knees that pressed together in the back seat of his mother’s Peugeot 205 left him with fond memories. The adventures that occurred out deep in the forest followed by sumptuous picnics, and the fresh fish barbecues at the nearby beach were as blissful and frequent as waves crashing on the shore.
Upon graduating from secondary school, Berhoumi progressed to higher education while equally setting his sights on a career in sports. He dedicated his studies to Arabic Literature and played team football for the local sports club. He spent the next few years trying to keep both paths alive, although managing to balance studies with his ambition to one day play professional football began to slip.
By the time he turned 19, Berhoumi’s future in education had come to a halt after failing his Lit exam. In the following years, despite his talent to potentially go pro, his discipline for football slowly began to blur and lose its routine. Under the weight of his divided attention, competing with the distractions of adolescence, chasing two dreams left him with neither. The pressure of grown-up responsibilities pushed him in search of new opportunities, to a rebirth of hope outside the underdeveloped North African continent, towards European shores.
By the late 90s, Algeria’s hard-won freedom and sovereign independence, from France in 1962, had lost its savouring taste of liberation and post-colonial pride. Many of its citizens were driven by the same dire need to escape the anxiety of an uncertain tomorrow — to break free from the state’s single vision for economic reform and a utopian nationalist forced agenda. Its Muslim society was struggling to reconcile its past with its future, amend its majority identity, and declare itself in language within the constitutional order.
I was fascinated by Berhoumi’s story as much as I was about Algeria’s unyielding loyalty for chasing a cultural, intolerant nationhood status. His story provides an invaluable insight into the country that raised him. Their histories are bound together. To speak of one is to invoke the other.
Historically, the barbaric treatment of political prisoners renditioned to the United States-occupied naval base in southeastern Cuba — in relation to the revenge attacks of 9/11 on the US in 2001 — are well-established in the court of public perception. By comparison, what is not extensively captured in the public sphere is the believers‘ experience, characterised and narrated through competent storytelling. All too often, the reactionist impulses and immediate turmoil of the present trip us up.
I remained in contact with Berhoumi, mostly through WhatsApp voice messages, and over the proceeding months and years, for posterity, further tried to piece together the outline (key moments) of his life before captivity. Like the public misspelling of his name, Berhoumi’s reported run-ins with the law are chronicled with errors, riddled with inaccuracies by unreliable sources. Distortions magnified across headlines and social feeds. In the following short story, I narrate events in the first-person to evoke the sensation of authenticity, as though it were Berhoumi narrating his own story.
The Sofiane Berhoumi Odyssey
My path into entrapment and exile to Guantanamo
In May 1995, while Algeria was in the fog of a revolutionary war, which would go on to last another five years (1992-2002), I packed my bag and left Bab El Oued, Algiers, on a ferry under a moonless sky, headed for Spain. The nation was in political-economic turmoil and being the eldest male sibling, I could not find a respectable-paying job to support my family during the revolt for Islamic independence. I was 22 and travelling alone as an undocumented migrant, aspiring to a decent quality of life. I was filled with both eager anticipation and the ache of a homeland left behind.
With my worn backpack slung over my shoulder, I stood over the railing watching the ferry gently rock as it docked at the Port of Barcelona. Day after day, I wondered from one neighbourhood to the next, working my way through the bustling markets — alive with the colour of mixed peppers and spices, olives and dried tomatoes, fresh seafood on beds of crushed ice, glistening bottles of olive oil on display, and the smell of fresh baked bread lingering in the air. Yet I found no work. Nothing. Factories, restaurants, and construction sites turned me away. I met others like me, Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians, hanging around or trying to make their way. I moved along the coast and strolled the beaches, the sand filling the gaps between my toes as I passed by tourists sipping their drinks under the sun.
I was told a man looking for work could always find something, but during my few weeks in Spain I was unable to secure a job. Sleeping rough and running out of cash, I took my chance and slipped into France via the bordering mountains into Pamplona and then along the coast to Marseille, where I worked for some weeks in a market selling fruits and vegetables, before heading 480 miles for the capital, Paris. I found work in the grimy yet vibrant area of Boulevard Barbes, buying and selling T-shirts, while squatting in various derelict properties — until I raised enough money to cross into England, some months later on a ferry from Calais to Dover.
I journeyed up to London, Victoria Station, then towards Regent’s Park, and on to Finsbury Park, where I remained among the Algerian community. I found a job in the market selling fresh produce, and in a factory making sandwiches while spending nights in mosques and people’s homes, up until the moment my application for asylum was approved. Before the year was over, I was housed in a North London hostel and felt a sense of belonging.
This period marked the backdrop to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. In the wake of it, Chechnya declared independence from Russia and, as a result, in the third year that followed, Moscow invaded its southern republic on 11 December 1994. During the conflict, civilians were subjected to relentless cruelty by Russian forces.
By late 1996, I felt an intense sense of moral duty, having watched bombed-out cities and displaced families on videotapes and in the media. The exposure to images of civilian death and suffering in Chechen villages and cities like Grozny — the country’s capital — had evoked in me intense emotion and the dangerous decision to look beyond my immediate interests, to stand up for the weak, and act to safeguard my fellow religious community from being annihilated by the genocidal Boris Yeltsin regime.
I had now encountered the erosion of Muslim identity in foreign lands and witnessed the corrupt and crumbling reality of our native motherlands. That was it for me. I’d seen enough. I enjoyed my time in England while it lasted. But I’d come to understand that the real work lay beyond comfort — realising my moral responsibility primarily lay in the Ummah’s frontline defence.
I was among the few who left Britain for Chechnya during John Major’s government to go fight against the Russian invasion and deliver aid to the oppressed. I travelled from Heathrow onboard Pakistan Airlines — direct to Karachi — and on to Khost in Afghanistan to receive my military education at Khaldan camp, founded after the USSR invasion of Afghanistan (1979-89).
During training I suffered permanent injuries to my left hand, and as a consequence missed numerous opportunities to cross into Chechnya; by 2000, the Russian state had firmly re-established its historic hegemony, technically ending the second phase of the war. In light of this, I continued living in Afghanistan, providing humanitarian assistance around the country until the unfortunate attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001 occurred and dramatically altered my situation and that of the entire world.
During the early stages of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan on 7 October, I spent Ramadan (15 November 2001) in the eastern Tora Bora mountains, bordering Pakistan, seeking protection in its fortress terrain away from the indiscriminate airstrikes pounding over urban regions of the country. I narrowly avoided becoming a casualty, unlike the collateral death of thousands of Afghan civilians. The sprawled out, deep valleys, and rugged landscape was a strategic stronghold, historically used to defeat empires or evade invaders.
Meanwhile, the Americans printed hundreds of thousands of bounty leaflets, loaded them up in their planes, and rained them down over Afghan and Pakistani villages offering impoverished villagers life-altering amounts of wealth in reward for information resulting in the capture of alleged suspected US enemies. Most who were brought to Guantanamo were rounded up because of empowered native bounty hunters eager to claim their cash reward.
Nearing the end of the Holy Month, the bombings increased in intensity. Fuelled by a mix of fear and anxiety, I fled the country, making my way through the mountains towards Spīn Ghar, Peshawar, Islamabad, to Lahore and Faisalabad — taking precautions along the way to avoid being ensnared by poor villagers enticed with incentives for nabbing individuals like me. American war propaganda had branded me guilty by association, so I considered myself cancelled: a fugitive on the run from unseen powerful persecuting predators.
Months later, on a Thursday night in late March 2002, the property in which I sought temporary refuge was collectively raided by Pakistani forces and the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Following an intense violent struggle to evade capture, I was eventually apprehended and encased in hand and leg iron chains resembling restraints used in Roman times. A sack was placed over my head, and I was loaded, along with other prisoners, on the back of a truck and transported around 200 miles to a CIA compound in Lahore. The brown interior of the premises resembled the inside of an open-plan villa. I felt faint. Exhausted. It had been almost a day since I’d eaten or drunk anything. When the sack was pulled off, a rush of dizziness suddenly overcame me as I bathed in bright lights, amidst a flurry of people, moving between stuck-on-the-wall posters of America’s most wanted.
I faced hours of questioning and was subjected to around ten more days of interrogation. The interrogators and their female Lebanese translator kept pressing me to confess my affiliation with the notorious anti-Western resistance group that had undertaken the 9/11 revenge attacks (for the United States’ links to the Zionist cause). Their voices thick with rage, terrorising me into giving immediate answers. I tirelessly explained, my allegiance belonged to the Creator, unbound by group affiliations. For desperate morons trained to probe for intelligence, retelling my drifting odyssey just made the inquisition process more gruelling. Nevertheless, they were unwavering in their commitment to protect the pillars of an empire in decline.
The most soul-crushing point came when an African American man threatened to kill me using his bare hands, if I did not provide him with the desired information. When I felt my throat dry and requested some water, the reaction of another African American CIA agent was to pull out a 6-inch knife and threaten to slice my neck wide open. His actions, soaked in fear and fury, mirrored the integrationist culture that the shahīd Malcolm X claimed had compromised the stability and historical dignity of his persecuted people: referring to those who had internalised the values of the very society oppressing them. I survived and spent the next two months or so in Rawalpindi prison in Islamabad, where CIA agents had me transferred, time and time again, from my rotten-smelling cell to off-site locations for further rounds of senseless interrogation.
Come mid-May 2002, I was taken to Islamabad airport and transported, like cargo making its way to port, to Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan, where I ended up incarcerated in an old Soviet hanger converted into a US detention camp. I was “processed”, and along with dozens of Muslim prisoners, held within rows of large open cells (each surrounded with barbed wire) and ordered to remain silent by US army recruits — who had now been handed the duty of managing our political detention. “We’ll send you to Egypt”, threatened an Egyptian American interrogator, “we know how to get information out of you”. The interrogations, which the CIA exclusively conducted in isolated concrete rooms, under armed guard, were so frequent and so many, I lost count.
Almost a month later, in June, I was air shipped to Kandahar and again stripped naked, thrown to the ground with my hands tied behind my back and shaved like livestock before market — and forced to sit exposed on a table surrounded by screaming men and women shouting obscenities in view of nostalgic images depicting the New York Twin Towers. Around a couple of hours later, I was made to dress in orange, shackled and hooded and again strapped inside the belly of a plane — heading for the last leg of my journey (unknown to me), nearly eight thousand miles to the iconic autonomous Caribbean island of Cuba.
I arrived on the island after what felt like a full day’s journey, my body stiff and aching and my mind clouded with dark thoughts from the inability to control my own movements or see my surroundings. I was utterly exhausted and perplexed about the purpose of my state-sanctioned abduction across the Atlantic. I later learned, the vendetta’s intention was to hold me in the tropical occupied zone of Guantanamo Bay, as a representative of anti-assimilation values, acting in the interests of trampled Muslims. Let me rephrase that, I was kept hostage as a symbol of vengeance to be held in limbo for political ransom in the bread and circuses quest of managing US public opinion.
I was given the identity (ISN) 694.
Here, you will spend the rest of your life,”
— the Americans repeatedly spoke proudly. However, in the end, I was transported back, returned to the soil where my journey took its first breath, Algeria, on 2 April 2022.
Source: Islam21c
