KABUL - When a shackled Mansoor Adayfi was lumped on to a heap of shivering, naked bodies in the pitch black, a hood over his head and muffs around his ears, he assumed he was going to die.
He had just been conducting research in Afghanistan, and was expecting to begin college at the end of the year. Instead, he was accused of being an al-Qaida leader, kidnapped by Afghan warlords and handed over to the CIA. He was kept in a prison camp in Afghanistan, then shipped to Guantánamo Bay. This was the beginning of 20 years of hell for Adayfi, who was held captive in Guantánamo until 2016.
His new memoir titled Don’y Forget us here,, much of it written while chained and shackled to the ground with cameras and guards watching him (“I was like, I’m going to make it, my friend!” he laughs) is a harrowing account of the injustices detainees faced. “At the beginning, we had no rights. We could not talk, we could not stand, we could not pray, we could not even look at the guards – you had to follow orders 24/7,” he says, describing the value system there as “what’s wrong is right, and what’s right is wrong”.
His memoire tells two coming-of-age stories in parallel: a makeshift island outpost becoming the world's most notorious prison and an innocent young man emerging from its darkness. Arriving as a stubborn teenager, Mansoor survived the camp's infamous interrogation program and became a feared and hardened resistance fighter leading prison riots and hunger strikes. With time though, he grew into the man nicknamed "Smiley Troublemaker": a student, writer, advocate, and historian. While at Guantánamo, he wrote a series of manuscripts he sent as letters to his attorneys, which he then transformed into this vital chronicle, in collaboration with award-winning writer Antonio Aiello. With unexpected warmth and empathy, Mansoor unwinds a narrative of fighting for hope and survival in unimaginable circumstances, illuminating the limitlessness of the human spirit. And through his own story, he also tells Guantánamo's story, offering an unprecedented window into one of the most secretive places on earth and the people—detainees and guards alike—who lived there with him.
Twenty years after 9/11, Guantánamo remains open, and at a moment of due reckoning, Mansoor Adayfi helps us understand what actually happened there—both the horror and the beauty—a stunning record of an experience we cannot afford to forget.
