WASHINGTON: The US Department of Defense announced on Sunday that it had transferred five Yemeni detainees from the Guantánamo Bay prison to the United Arab Emirates after 14 years. None of the war-prisoners could be charged with a crime.
The transfers reduced the detainee population at the prison to 107. As many as 17 other proposed transfers of lower-level detainees are in the bureaucratic pipeline, an official familiar with internal deliberations said.
The resettlement of the Yemeni detainees was the first of its kind to the United Arab Emirates, which had previously taken in just one former Guantánamo detainee, in 2008 — its own citizen.
For years, the Obama and George W. Bush administrations had held out hope that the political and security climate of Yemen would stabilize enough that the dozens of lower-level Yemenis detained at Guantánamo could be repatriated there. Over the last few years, however, the United States has begun persuading other countries to take in small batches of that group instead.
In May, President Obama met at Camp David with leaders or representatives of the six Middle Eastern countries that make up the Gulf Cooperation Council, including a representative from the United Arab Emirates. The main topic of discussion was the nuclear agreement with Iran, but officials familiar with the deliberations said Mr. Obama had also pressed them to consider resettling groups of detainees. The deal announced on Sunday appears to be the first fruits of those talks.
Each of the five detainees was captured near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in late 2001, after the battle of Tora Bora, when many low-level fighters fled to the mountains, according to leaked military dossiers.
