The long goodbye - Closing time at Guantanamo Bay

President Barack Obama has promised to close the Guantánamo Bay detention facility by the end of January 2010. The closure highlights how the new administration is attempting to break with the policies of its predecessor and will allow it to remove an issue exploited by Islamist propagandists. However, there is also a risk that ex-detainees could swell the ranks of Al-Qaeda.

The Yemeni branch of Al-Qaeda underlined this possibility on 19 January, the day before Obama's inauguration, when it released a statement indicating it had merged with its Saudi counterpart. Said al-Shiri, a Saudi who was released from Guantánamo in November 2007, is the deputy commander of the organisation, according to the statement. A video released a few days later featuring al-Shiri and Muhammad al-Awfi al-Harbi, another Saudi former Guantánamo detainee, as well as the two Yemeni leaders of the newly formed Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), further emphasised the new group's emergence.

Saudi Arabia then released a list of 85 Al-Qaeda suspects (83 Saudis and two Yemenis) it said had gone back on their pledges to abstain from violence. The list included both al-Shiri and al-Awfi as well as nine other former Guantánamo detainees. All had graduated from the kingdom's jihadist rehabilitation programme. The recidivism of these men underscores perhaps the most serious of the many problems that the Obama administration is facing as it seeks to close Guantánamo: if ideologically committed, many released Guantánamo detainees may return to violence.