On March 23, 2008, former Guantanamo Bay detainee Abdallah Saleh al-Ajmi detonated a pickup truck filled with explosives at an Iraqi army base outside Mosul. The blast killed 13 Iraqi soldiers and wounded 42 others. (Courtesy of Khalid al-Mahan - Courtesy of Khalid al-Mahan)A little more than two years after his release from the Guantanamo Bay military prison, Abdallah Saleh al-Ajmi knelt in front of a white wall, clutched the upturned barrel of an AK-47 rifle and delivered a message before a video camera.
The scraggly beard that his young son once loved to play with had been shaved off, leaving only an exiguous moustache. His curly, shoulder-length locks had been clipped down to a crew cut. Gone, too, were the crisp, white headdress he often wore and any semblance of the good humor once familiar to his family. He was sullen and angry -- still bitter about being locked up for almost four years at the high-security U.S. detention center on the southeastern coast of Cuba.
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My Comment: The Washington Post spends a lot of time trying to find a reason for why this jihadist did what he did .... but it ignores what is the simplest reason of them all. As a young man he went to Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban against the Northern Alliance. He was looking for jihad and he found it. The fact that he found himself at Guantanamo is not surprising, what is surprising is that he only spent 4 years there.
Once released .... he still pursued his goal of jihad. Blowing up an Iraqi army barracks was the inevitable result. To portray him as a victim of Guantanamo is silly .... the true victims are the people that he probably killed in Afghanistan, and the Iraqi soldiers in their barracks.
