An Iraqi man who pleaded guilty to commanding insurgents who committed war crimes in Afghanistan filed a lawsuit in federal court Friday seeking to stop his transfer from the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to a prison in Iraq.
The petition, filed by his lawyers, made long-running public negotiations to transfer Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, 63, into Iraqi government custody despite protests from him and his lawyers that may be subject to abuse and inadequate medical care.
Mr. Hadi, who says his real name is Nashwan al-Tamir, is the oldest and most disabled detainee at the offshore detention area as a result of a crippling spinal disease and six surgeries at the base. In 2022, he pleaded guilty to war crimes charges, accepting responsibility for the actions of some of the forces under his command, in a deal to end his sentence in 2032. The deal included the possibility that he would serve the sentence in the custody of another country that she is better suited to provide him with medical care.
His lawyers said the U.S. plan is for the Iraqi government to house him at Karkh prison outside Baghdad, the former U.S. detention facility called Camp Cropper that held hundreds of prisoners in the years before it was returned to Iraqi control in 2010.
“Due to his conviction here and the myriad problems with the Iraqi prison system, Mr. al-Tamir cannot be safely housed in an Iraqi prison,” the lawyers said in their 27-page filing. “Furthermore, he does not believe the Iraqi government can provide the medical care he needs for conditions that were exacerbated by inadequate medical care while he was at Guantanamo Bay.”
The lawsuit seeks to block a deal that is part of an effort by the Biden administration to reduce the prison population before President-elect Donald J. Trump. Four prisoners, including two Malaysian men who, like Mr. Hadi pleaded guilty to war crimes, repatriated in less than a month. Unlike Mr. Hadi, none of the four men, including a Tunisian national and a Kenyan citizen, were against being handed over to their home countries.
It is not known when the Pentagon plans to extradite Mr. Hadi in Iraq. However, the Defense Department notified Congress of the plan on December 13. If the administration complies with a legal requirement of 30 days’ notice to Congress, he could be transferred from Guantanamo the week of January 12.
Government lawyers agreed to an expedited process for the challenge. They notified Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that they would like to respond to the preliminary injunction question by Wednesday.
State Department and Justice Department officials declined to discuss the case.
Mr. Hadi was represented in the petition by Benjamin C. McMurray and Scott K. Wilson, federal public defenders in Utah. It was also signed by Susan Hensler, an attorney employed by the Department of Defense who has represented him since 2017.
The lawyers cited a 2023 State Department report on concerns about human rights abuses in Iraq, which specifically cited “harsh and life-threatening prison conditions.” They asked the court to temporarily ban his transportation while the case is being tried. “Permanent harm warrants a preliminary injunction against the immediate transfer of Mr. al-Tamir to an Iraqi prison to serve his sentence.”
Mr. Hadi was born in Mosul, Iraq, in 1961. He left Iraq in 1990 to avoid being drafted into Saddam Hussein’s army for what became the first US invasion of Iraq, and then settled in Afghanistan. In 2003 and 2004, early in the US invasion, Taliban and Qaeda forces under his command illegally used civilian cover in attacks that killed 17 US and coalition forces in Afghanistan. His forces, for example, had a militant pose as a taxi driver in a taxi loaded with explosives.
At Guantanamo, he relied on a wheelchair and a four-wheeled walker and was held for years in a cell equipped with accommodations for the disabled.
His lawyers said in their filing that US officials had informed them of the plan to repatriate Mr. Hadi “a week before Christmas,” adding that “government officials informed defense attorneys that they had concluded that Iraq was the ‘only’ option.”
Both the detainee and lawyers opposed the transfer, the filing said, citing U.S. obligations under international and constitutional law not to send someone to a country where they may suffer abuse.
Scott Roehm of the Center for Victims of Torture, an advocacy group, said he understood that “senior State Department officials had previously determined that Mr. al-Tamir could not be sent to an Iraqi prison without violating the ban on torture. “
“The State Department’s own human rights reports, consistent with this determination, find that Iraqi prisons are rife with serious human rights abuses, including torture,” he said. “If the government now takes a different view, it needs to explain why by making its analysis public.”
