Our brother in Guantánamo
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Ismail Mahmoud Muhammad was taken away in June 2007 - in handcuffs.
His life as a free man ended at Djibouti Airport on the Horn of Africa. The local police arrested Ismail. He was taken to a US naval base in Djibouti, and from there to the Guantánamo detention centre in Cuba.
He had the very bad luck to be the fifth-last of the 775 people taken to Guantánamo between 2002 and 2007.
Now Ismail is in Guantánamo for a third year running. Nobody is accusing him of anything. It is apparent that he never was part of the East African faction of al-Qaeda, as the Americans claimed when he was arrested, but he is still behind bars.
Ismail is to be released in the coming months, since Guantánamo is to be shut down by January 2010, and the United States will probably not charge him with anything. Now he needs a country that he would dare come back to.
At least in Helsinki there are people waiting for him.
Ismail’s younger sister Amina Muumin gets off the Arabic style sofa in the living room and gets a few old photographs from the bedroom. One of them shows a young man dressed in black standing on a roof terrace in Hargeisa in Somaliland in the early 1990s. There is also a school picture taken in the 1980s and a passport photo from either 2004 or 2005 when the man in the picture studied in the Pakistani city of Islamabad.
The man in the pictures is Ismail, the 39-year-old elder brother of Amina and Ayan. They have the same mother, but different fathers. All three parents have passed away.
“Peaceful, honest” says Ayan describing Ismail. “He has always liked peace, because there has always been war in Somalia. He hated war above all else.
Ayan is 21 years old now. She arrived in Finland as a refugee in 1999. Somalia had collapsed as a state, Ayan’s mother was ill and died of an asthma attack in 2001. Her father had died in the civil war in the early 1990s. “I have no idea how he died”, Ayan says.
Now she works as a cleaner. In the future she plans to resume her studies to become a nurse.
her little sister, 19-year-old Amina came to Finland in 2006. Before that she lived in Pakistan with Ismail, where their older brother studied at University. When Ismail returned to Somalia with his wife and children, Amina came to Finland to be with her sister.
Now Amina is studying in Kerava to be a laboratory worker. Three months ago the sisters moved into a comfortable two-room apartment in a Helsinki suburb.
They do not get much money, but still they manage. They seem to be quite ordinary young women.
So is Ismail a terrorist of the East African al-Qaeda? That is quite a serious charge.
To understand the suspicions of the United States, one needs to revisit Djibouti Airport in June 2007. Ismail was on his way to Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, to attend a conference of Somalia’s Islamist ARS opposition movement. The movement is gathering up its ranks, as six months earlier there had been a coup in Somalia, where a coup had taken place, in which the country’s governing Islamic Courts Union (ICU) had been overthrown with the help of the Ethiopian military.
Ismail is a friend and advisor to Sheikh Sarif, the leader of the ICU. The union, which governed Somalia in 2006 is no group of choir boys. It also includes extremists, such as Head of Security Yusuf Mohammed Siad Inda'ade, who declared holy war against Ethiopia in December 2006, and invited foreign Muslim fighters to join the ICU.
Ismail never manages to get on the plane to Asmara. Police in Djibouti hand him over to the Americans. He is transported to Camp Lemonier, the US naval base in Djibouti, north of Somalia. He is interrogated, and is kept inside a freight container.
On June 6th, the US Department of Defence reported on the transfer of a “dangerous suspected terrorist” Abdullahi Sudi Arale to Guantánamo. Abduhalli Sudi Arale was, in fact, the same man as Ismail Mahmoud Muhammad. Not even Ismail’s lawyer Cori Crider knows where the USA came up with the name Abdullahi Sudi Arale. Only Arale has an explanation - it was Ismail’s nickname.
The Pentagon claims that Ismail had acted as a courier between the Somali terrorist group Al Shabaab and the Afghani al-Qaeda and helped terrorists in the acquisition of weapons and explosives. “We believe that he is a member of the extremely dangerous al-Qaeda network”, says Bryan Whitman, assistant head of public relations at the Department of Defence. “The arrest of Abdullahi Sudi Arale is an example of the genuine threat that these dangerous terrorists pose to the United States and other countries around the world.”
Ismail is flown to Guantánamo, but there are no big headlines. The media is more interested in the suicide of a Saudi Arabian in Guantánamo exactly a week earlier.
Ismail becomes prisoner number 10027.
In June of 2007 Auan and Amina get a telephone call from their brothers in Somalia. Ismail had been arrested two weeks earlier at Djibouti Airport, and taken to Guantánamo. How did the brothers know that right away?
“If something happens in Somalia, everyone hears about it”, Ayan says.
It is hard to believe the news. What in the world would Ismail do in Guantánamo? There are suspected terrorists there, who are interrogated in handcuffs by soldiers.
Ayan looks for confirmation to the rumours on the Internet, and finds it. At first she does not do anything for several months. What could she do with the United States Department of Defence against them?
In 2008 Ayan contacts the Finnish Red Cross, which sends a letter from the sisters to Ismail. It is a short letter - asking Ismail how he is. The sisters say that everything is good with them.
“Not much else, we signed our names. I still don’t know if it ever reached him. I have not had contact with Ismail, not even a letter.”
This is baffling. It is hard for native-born Finns to even to imagine what it would be like to have a brother imprisoned in Guantánamo. Did Ayan and Amina tell their friends in Helsinki about it?
“If a friend would ask me about my brother, I would speak openly about him”, Amina says.
Amina has no native-born Finnish friends - all of her friends are immigrants. They were not terribly surprised by the information.
“They are quite aware of what can happen in the world.”
What if Ismail really is a dangerous man - a terrorist of the al-Qaeda network? What if the United States simply doesn’t have sufficient evidence against him?
Only fragments of information can be found about Ismail’s past. He was born in Mogadishu in 1970. His family lived in the district of Hodan. He went to primary school and secondary school. In 1990 he began university studies in Mogadishu.
Civil war broke out in Somalia when dictator Siad Barre was deposed in 1991. Ismail and his family fled Mogadishu to Burco and Hargeisa in the north of Somalia. He became a political activist.
He wrote for the Voice of Hargeisa newspaper, took part in the activities of a voluntary organisation, and taught English. It is said that he also took part in peace talks which were held in Burco and Hargeisa to end the civil war.
All the way through 1999 Ayan, Ismail and the rest of the family lived under the same roof in a rental apartment in Hargeisa. They managed reasonably well economically.
“There were quite a few wars in Hargeisa as well. We had to flee two or three times. We went to Burco, which we had to leave when the war reached there.
In 1999 Ismail moved to the Pakistani capital Islamabad with his wife, children, and Amina. He had been given a spot as a graduate stuident of English literature at the International Islamic University. Amina says that he also studied business and information technology.
It is hard to tell what all Ismail did in Islamabad. According to Amina, he did not take part in political activities while in Pakistan. Nevertheless, he was a person of some influence. There is a video on the Internet showing Ismail in a checkered shirt, speaking to a room full of Somali university students. He speaks in a moderate tone about matters affecting Pakistan’s Somali community - not so much about politics.
“Life in Pakistan was expensive. We had money problems”, Amina says. “Ismail had no job, although he did work for a short time as a ticket agent for Somali Airlines in Islamabad.”
At the time, Ayan already lived in Finland with her uncle.
“We called four or five times a month. We would talk about quite ordinary things. Ismail said that it is more peaceful in Pakistan than in Somalia. He was my only elder brother, and he took care of me after mother. He cared for me even though I was in Finland”, Ayan says.
In 2006 Ismail moved back to Mogadishu, when the Islamists had taken control of the capital. Ismail joined the Islamic Courts Union, which led the country. Its leaders also included Somalia’s current President, Sheikh Sharif.
It is certain that he was politically active. He was Sharif’s friend and advisor.
“How can my brother be accused on the basis of being with Sheikh Sharif?” Ayan asks. “Even the United States approved of Sharif.”
Ayan has little information of what Ismail was doing in the last years. She has received fragments of information from acquaintances in Somalia. Ismail’s friend Ismaan Abokori, who now lives in London, wrote in an e-mail that when the Somali opposition, supported by the Ethiopian army, attacked Mogadishu, Ismail “refused to flee Mogadishu, and fought valiantly against the attackers.
So apparently he fought in 2006, even though the same e-mail lists Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and Ghana’s independence fighter and President Kwame Nkrumah as his role models.
Ismail’s British lawyer Cori Crider met Ismail in February 2009 in Guantánamo. According to Crider, it is almost 100 per cent certain that the United States will never indict Ismail for anything. Ismail has been under suspicion of smuggling weapons from Afghanistan to Somalia, for instance, but he has apparently never been in Afghanistan. According to some Somalis, Ismail is nevertheless a militant.
“That is extremely hard to believe”, Crider said in February. “He is a teacher and a journalist, who established the first English Language school in Hargeisa. He has no military training. He is quiet and peace loving.”
According to Crider, Ismail is one of the moderates, who organised the Asmara Conference aimed at peace. The peace treaty was reached last year, and in January 2009 Sheikh Sharif was chosen as president - the same man whose advisor Ismail had served as. In August Sharif met Ismail’s lawyer Cori Crider, to whom he said that Ismail’s “moderate views” would be useful in his administration.
So Ismail could join the staff of the Somali President. However, for some reason he will not return to his home country.
Three weeks before the United States had Ismail arrested, he had a telephone conversation with Ayan and Amina. Since then the sisters have not heard a word from him.
“It was a normal phone call. He was always calm”, Ayan says.
The next time that the sisters heard about Ismail, he was already in Guantánamo. Now they are wondering what kinds of conditions Ismail is being kept in. Could he have changed?
“Only when I have heard his voice and spoken to him can I say if Guantánamo has had any effect on him. But I have not spoken to him, and I haven’t even had a letter.”
Ayan hopes that Finland would grant Ismail asylum.
It is hard to predict if that will happen. In August, the Ministry for Foreign Affairs said that Finland supports the plans of the United States to close Guantánamo by January 2010. The roundabout statement would seem to indicate that if the United States asks, Finland could be willing to receive a few harmless individuals who are not being charged with anything by the United States.
Anu Laamanen of the political section of the Foreign Ministry will say nothing about discussions between Finland and the United States on Guantánamo.
“Channels of communication are open”, is all that Laamanen will say.
There is room for Ismail in his sisters’ apartment, Ayan says. However, it is not that simple. Ismail has a wife and four children in Somaliland. The oldest of the children is eight years old and the youngest is three.
“I am in contact with the family”, Ayan says. “Every day before they go to school, the children ask where their father is, and why he does not even call.”
Caring for the family are the two younger brothers of Ismail and Ayan, who live in Burco.
“And I send money from Finland”, Ayan says.
But isn’t Ismail needed at home in Burco, where his four children are without their father?
“In Somalia he would be killed. There is no functioning state there”, Ayan says.
“We know with 100 per cent certainty that he is innocent. He is no al-Qaeda man. But it will not sink in when we say that his arrest was a misunderstanding, and that the United States is not accusing him of anything.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 27.9.2009
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