A Chinese Muslim's Desperate Plea From Gitmo

The stories of the Uighurs in Guantánamo – Muslims from the oppressed Xinjiang province of China, formerly known as East Turkistan – have long demonstrated chronic injustice on the part of the U.S. authorities to those who know of them, although they have only sporadically registered on the media's radar.

Numbering 22 men in total, three were picked up randomly in Afghanistan, another was caught crossing the Pakistani border disguised in a burqa, while the other 18 were seized together by opportunistic Pakistani villagers after fleeing Afghanistan in the wake of the U.S.-led invasion in October 2001, and sold to U.S. forces for a bounty, as was common at the time. A leaflet dropped by U.S. planes offered enterprising villagers and soldiers "millions of dollars for helping the anti-Taliban force catch al-Qaeda and Taliban murderers."

These 18 men, who had fled their homeland because of persecution, in search of a new life, or in the hope of gaining some sort of training to enable them to fight back against their oppressors, had been living together in a small, run-down hamlet in Afghanistan's Tora Bora mountains, mending the settlement's ruined buildings, and occasionally training on their only weapon, an aging AK-47.

After the U.S.-led invasion, they were targeted in a U.S. bombing raid, in which several men died. The survivors then made their way across the mountains to the Pakistani border, where they were first welcomed by the villagers, then betrayed by them. In U.S. custody, they attracted attention because of their supposed insights into the workings of the Chinese government, but it was apparent from early on that they had not been involved with either the Taliban or al-Qaeda, and that there was no reason to hold them. More