My to rturers are now my friends
Subject of hit movie The Mauritanian is amazingly forgiving after 15 years of hell at Guantanamo Bay
Haunted by horrific memories of torture at the hands of his Guantanamo Bay guards, Mohamedou Slahi has every reason to want to block out the people who robbed him of 15 years of his life.
The softly-spoken 50-year-old still suffers from terrible nightmares and wakes up sobbing, six years after he was freed without charge from the notorious US military prison.
His ordeal, during which he was subjected to beatings, waterboarding and sexual abuse, is now being told in new movie The Mauritanian, directed by Kevin Macdonald.
It stars Tahar Rahim, Benedict Cumberbatch and Jodie Foster, who won a Golden Globe for her role in the film.
Viewers have been left sickened by the cruelty of Mohamedou’s American torturers. But incredibly, he has refused to be consumed by hatred.
Since leaving Guantanamo Bay in 2016, he has forged an unlikely friendship with one of his former captors, Steve Wood, who has since visited him in his west African home and is even the godfather to his baby son Ahmed.
A lot of people have asked for forgiveness... they heard of my friendship with Steve
MOHAMEDOU ON HIS FORMER CAPTORS GETTING IN TOUCH
Mohamedou, who is also now godfather to Steve’s daughter, says: “The first time he came, my nephew, who was five, asked why I was letting my former guard into my house.
“I told him he was a good guard but he said, ‘He had the keys. Why didn’t he open your cell?’ I didn’t have an answer. But after he got here, Steve went outside and played football with him, and fell in love with him. My family isn’t as forgiving, but I’m not my family. I am my experience in life.”
Mohamedou reveals that four other guards – two of whom “participated heavily” in his torture – are also now friends with him on Facebook.
And he has graciously extended the same hand of friendship to several others, including the feared Mr X
– a masked monster who kept him awake by blasting constant heavy metal music that was so loud, it made his ears bleed. Incredibly, Mohamedou now speaks of Mr X and his other tormentors with compassion – and even pity. Smiling broadly as he speaks from his home in Rosso,
Mauritania, he says: “He’s a broken man. What he did at Guantanamo has destroyed him.
“He called me. He went into a monologue about why his country shouldn’t have done that to me and how they shouldn’t lie about what they did.
“A lot of other people who have contacted me have asked me for forgiveness. They heard about my friendship with Steve, one of their fellow guards and I think that encouraged them to get in touch, too.”
National Guard member Steve spent
nine months guarding Mohamedou after he signed a confession.
Mohamedou, who learned English in prison, says: “He arrived in 2004. I was beaten up and subdued and I was very scared and reclusive.
“He came to me on his first day on duty and said, ‘Do you drink coffee?’
“I’m not a big coffee drinker – I like tea, like the English – but I said yes because he was extending his hand and I was needing it.
“Then we played cards, he taught me rummy, chess, we played Risk and
watched films. We gossiped about the other interrogators – in Mauritania, our favourite sport is gossiping. We became friends. He’s come to visit me twice.
“I’m ready to make friends with anyone. Americans aren’t bad people.
“We live in a world of masks, and they had put theirs on.”
Mohamedou’s lack of bitterness is remarkable given all he has been through. The son of a camel herder and the ninth of 12 children, he left his home country at the age of 18 to study electrical engineering in Germany.
During his time there, he travelled to Afghanistan for two months to help the US-backed mujahideen who were fighting Russian invaders. At that point, the West and Osama bin Laden’s Arabs were on the same side.
After returning home for his niece’s wedding in November 2001 – two months after the 9/11 attacks – Mohamedou was snatched by security services on US orders. He was put on a flight to Jordan where he was kept in a secret
prison for six months before being flown to Bagram, the biggest US base in Afghanistan. He was then loaded onto a plane with 33 other detainees, landing in Cuba on August 5, 2002. From then on, he was Prisoner 760.
After a year being questioned by FBI officers determined to find a connection between him and 9/11, the military subjected him to a torture regime.
He was alternately starved and forcefed, kept awake for 73 days and sexually abused by female soldiers. A Justice Department investigation found he
“was beaten, sexually throttled, put in extreme isolation, shackled to the floor, stripped naked and put under strobe lights while blasted with metal music”.
When he still refused to confess, he was blindfolded and taken out to sea on a high-speed boat where his head was plunged into the water, before enduring a three-hour beating while covered in ice.
He finally broke when interrogators told him the US had been authorised to arrest his mother and place her in Guantanamo’s “all-male environment”.
After his case was taken on by pro bono lawyer Nancy Hollander – played by Foster in the film – a US judge granted Mohamedou a writ of habeas corpus and ordered his release.
But an appeal by the Obama administration meant he remained at Guantanamo for six more years.
Sadly, Mohamedou never saw his mother again after she died in 2013.
He says one of the most distressing scenes in the film, for him, is that of his mother clutching prayer beads as he is taken away from the family home.
“That scene was shot in my mother’s house,” he says. “It’s exactly what happened, in exactly the same place. It was the last time I ever saw her.
“It was really hard to watch. When I was told that my mother had died, I was destroyed.”
Mohamedou’s ordeal has also left him with deep psychological scars.
“Sometimes I wake up crying, feeling that I can’t breathe and I have this very recurring dream of someone attacking
It was really hard to watch. It’s exactly what happened in exactly the same place
MOHAMEDOU ON FILM SCENE DEPICTING HIS LATE MOTHER
me,” he says. After leaving Guantanamo, Mohamedou married US lawyer Catherine and together, they had Ahmed.
But with the US and its allies including Britain still refusing to grant him a visa he hasn’t been able to visit them or go west to publicise the movie.
He says: “I’m very frustrated with Priti Patel’s decision to deny me entry to the UK. I was never convicted. I am a victim of torture and kidnapping.
“I’m going to challenge it. Because of the film, I now have the means and the momentum. I’m not going to give up.”
Mohamedou has also joined the campaign to close Guantanamo and wrote to US President Joe Biden, who has promised to shut the camp.
Of its 779 prisoners, only eight have been convicted of a crime and three of those have been overturned on appeal.
He says of Mr Biden: “I think he’s a good guy. Guantanamo does not belong in a democracy. It’s a disrespect to human dignity, to the rule of law, it’s an embarrassment to all the allies of the US, including the UK.”