Growing Up Guantánamo

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Mohammed el Gharani, a citizen of Chad raised in Saudi Arabia, had just turned 15 when he arrived at Guantánamo Bay in February 2002, shepherded off a military cargo plane wearing shackles and blackout goggles. He weighed 126 pounds, was too young to shave, and for months didn't know where he was. "Some brothers said Europe," he later recalled in an in​terview with the London Review of Books. Others thought the unsparing winter sun suggested Brazil. When an interrogator finally told him he was in Cuba, Mohammed didn't recognize the name. "An island in the middle of the ocean," the interrogator said. "Nobody can run away from here and you'll be here forever."



Omar Khadr, born in Toronto, was also shipped to the offshore prison as a juvenile. The 16-year-old made an early impression on the Army chaplain on base, who, walking by his cell, found Omar curled up asleep, arms wrapped tightly around a Disney book with drawings of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Goofy. "He definitely seemed out of place," the chaplain told reporter Michelle Shephard, who wrote about Omar in her book Guantánamo's Child.​



Fahd Ghazy, who grew up in a Yemeni farming village, was seized when he was 17. He had recently graduated at the top of his high school class. One of Guantánamo's earliest detainees, he was initially housed in the jerrybuilt, open-air cages of Camp X-Ray. Around the time he was transferred to a permanent cellblock, Fahd learned he'd won a university scholarship to study in Yemen's capitol, Sana'a. Nearly 13 years later, he's still at the naval base—still without charge.

Swept up as juveniles, Mohammed, Omar, and Fahd were among some 15 to 20 detainees whose adolescence and early adulthood unfolded within the desolate confines of the prison camp, marked by isolation, abusive treatment, and the chronic stress of indefinite detention. For years, the Pentagon misreported how many children had been seized. "They don't come with birth certificates," a Guantánamo public affairs officer ​told the New York Times in 2005. To this day, the government considers Fahd to be older than he is, explains his lawyer, Omar Farah of the Center for Constitutional Rights. While visiting Fahd's relatives in rural Yemen last year, Farah confirmed the birth date Fahd has consistently maintained, recorded in his family's Koran.

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