US loses former Guantanamo inmates after Donald Trump shuts office tracking them

The Trump administration closed a diplomatic office designed to keep track of released Guantanamo inmates and make sure they didn’t return to their insurgencies.

And now the US government has lost track of several of them, including one who has returned to a terrorist-held part of Syria, a Tribune News Service investigation has found.

The Obama administration created the office of the Special Envoy for Guantanamo Closure with a mandate to negotiate and follow up on prisoner releases. But US President Donald Trump’s State Department emptied the office to underscore his campaign promise to keep open the US military prison in Cuba, which today has 40 detainees.

One of the most glaring examples is that of former captive Abu Wa’el Dhiab, a Syrian who vanished from Uruguay last summer. Jose Gonzalez, executive adviser to Uruguay’s Interior Minister, told McClatchy that Dhiab walked across the Uruguay-Brazilian border, took a bus to Sao Paulo and caught a flight to Turkey. The Turkish Embassy in Washington said a search of Interior Ministry records found no evidence that he had arrived there.

Dhiab has been detected in south central Turkey where he has slipped in and out of the rebel held Idlib province, controlled by the al-Qaeda affiliate Nusra Front, according to a Syrian diplomatic source, citing Syrian intelligence. His mother is receiving medical care in Turkey, the Syrian said.