Collateral damage: the impact of Guantanamo on a family

Ahmed Rabbani has been held without trial at Guantanamo for 18 years. He describes the impact on his children.

Ahmed Rabbani is Pakistani Rohingya and is currently being held in Guantanamo Bay. Following his divorce in 2002, he had just remarried and – unknown to him at the time – his wife was pregnant when he was captured in Karachi on September 10, 2002. His youngest son was born some months later. They have never met. He was picked up by the Pakistani authorities and handed over to the US, then taken to the Dark Prison in Kabul where he says he was tortured for 540 days. It is believed he had been falsely identified as Hassan Ghul, a Pakistani member of al-Qaeda. Later, it was reported (in the US Senate Report on CIA Interrogation, 2014) that the US had captured Ghul and even held him briefly in the Dark Prison – but then let him go back to Pakistan. He was killed in a drone strike in 2012. Ahmed, meanwhile, was rendered to Guantanamo Bay.