Here is how Obama’s strategy will work out.
Freed to wage war on British troops: Guantanamo prisoner is now a Taliban chief
A Taliban chief responsible for deadly bomb attacks against British troops in Afghanistan was a prisoner in Guantanamo Bay just 15 months ago.
Abdullah Ghulam Rasoul was released from the camp in Cuba after U.S. officials decided he was no longer a threat.
He was handed over to the Afghan government who then freed him in Kabul early last year, according to Pentagon and CIA officials.
Rasoul was among 13 Afghan prisoners released to Hamid Karzai’s government. He is now known as Mullah Abdullah Zakir - the Taliban’s new operations chief in Helmand and the architect of a new offensive against British troops.
Since then, the threat from the Taliban has soared as they deploy more sophisticated and powerful roadside bombs against British troops.
More than 40 British troops have been killed by roadside bombs since last year. One Whitehall official told The Times: ‘He is a serious player.’
Sources at the Pentagon said that Rasoul, who spent six years at Guantanamo Bay where he was Detainee 008, has joined a growing faction of former inmates of the camp who have rejoined militant groups.
It is thought that as many as 60 former detainees have resurfaced on the battlefields.
Rasoul was captured in 2001, according to documents assembled by the U.S. military for a 2005 review of his combatant status at Guantanamo.
Armed with a gun and sitting in the car of an alleged Taliban leader, he insisted to the U.S. authorities that he had been forced to carry the gun by the Taliban.
Rasoul told the tribunal in 2005 that in fact he had surrendered with other Taliban members to the Northern Alliance in Konduz on December 12, 2001.
British officials and Taliban sources said that Rasoul was believed to be based in Quetta, Pakistan.
‘He is back in Helmand since his release,’ said a Taliban commander.
‘He is in the border area now, sometimes in Pakistan and sometimes in Afghanistan. He is a very big commander.’
Rasoul was flown home to Kabul on December 12, 2007.
He was then held in Pul-e-Charkhi maximum security prison in a block that had been specially renovated by the Americans for the detention of prisoners transferred from jails at Bagram airbase, near Kabul, and Guantanamo.
He was freed early in 2008, but the circumstances of his release remain unclear.
Although the full text of the decision to release him has not been declassified, documents show that the decision was unanimous.
Some of the factors that helped his release were that he denied knowledge of Osama Bin Laden, said he had been conscripted into the Taliban and denied that he had ever been to a training camp.
He also promised that he intended to return to a peaceful life in Afghanistan.
‘I want to go back home and join my family and work on my land and help my family,’ he said.
He did admit having joined the Taliban twice - once, under duress, in 1995, and the second time in 1997, to get proper treatment for injuries sustained in a bombing.
