Commander of Afghan Insurgency Pleads Guilty at Guantánamo Bay

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — An Iraqi prisoner who commanded insurgents during the U.S. war in Afghanistan pleaded guilty on Monday to war crimes fees relevant to lethal assaults on allied soldiers in 2003 and 2004, in a deal that could hand him off to the custody of another place by 2024.

Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, now in his 60s, put in a great deal of the daylong listening to responding, “Yes, your honor,” to the issues of the military services judge, Lt. Col. Mark F. Rosenow, about a magic formula account of his routines in Afghanistan as a co-conspirator with Osama bin Laden and other top rated Qaeda leaders involving 1996 and 2003. The account incorporated much more than 100 things.

He could be sentenced to 10 yrs in jail, significantly of it to be served in the custody of a further region, below a plea settlement that has nonetheless to be made community.

He pleaded responsible to the common war crimes of attacking guarded assets — a U.S. navy medevac helicopter that insurgents who answered to him unsuccessful to shoot down in Afghanistan in 2003 — and of treachery and conspiracy connected to insurgent bombings that killed at minimum three allied troops, a person every from Canada, Britain and Germany.

People allied soldiers have been killed by vehicle bombs or suicide bombers posing as civilians, the judge claimed. If Mr. Hadi experienced identified in progress about the options, he experienced a responsibility to stop them. If he had possessed no prior knowledge, the decide stated, Mr. Hadi experienced a duty to punish the perpetrators.

But the plea offer still represented a drastic scaling back again of the government’s prices towards him. None of the crimes to which he pleaded guilty manufactured him immediately or indirectly liable for some of the most severe allegations designed by armed forces prosecutors when they billed him in 2014.

Absent from his situation have been allegations that he was section of the sweeping Qaeda conspiracy to rid the Arabian Peninsula of non-Muslims. Nor was there any claim of obligation or expertise of the Sept. 11 assaults, which prompted the creation of the Guantánamo prison and the war court docket.

None of the charges held him accountable for the destruction by the Taliban of monumental Buddha statues in Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Valley, a UNESCO Planet Heritage web page, in March 2001. Nor did the prices tie him to the 2003 assassination by insurgents of a French worker for the United Nations aid company.

Mr. Hadi, who suggests his actual identify is Nashwan al-Tamir, was captured in Turkey in 2006 and introduced to Guantánamo Bay the up coming 12 months. Endeavours to bring him to demo have been slowed by the coronavirus pandemic and by his wellness. He has a degenerative spinal ailment that has left him paralyzed at moments.

Plea talks in the circumstance begun this year underneath a new Biden-period push to shut the Guantánamo jail, which has an ageing detainee populace and limited capacity to deliver health and fitness care with out airlifting in experts and tools.

Less than Mr. Hadi’s plea agreement, which was arrived at in May perhaps and refined about the weekend, a armed service jury will hear the evidence in opposition to him and be asked to select inside of a variety of 25 to 30 years of confinement, setting up with his plea.

Once that is done, according to the deal, the senior Pentagon formal responsible for overseeing the war courtroom will cut down it to 10 a long time.

The arrangement postpones sentencing for two many years, providing time his attorneys hope will be sufficient to discover a sympathetic country to receive him and offer him with lifelong healthcare care. His spinal disorder has essential 5 operations in significantly less than a calendar year at Guantánamo and has still left him relying on a wheelchair and walker — and in require of extra surgery to handle his periodic paralysis.

“He pleaded responsible for his purpose as a frontline commander in Afghanistan,” reported his lawyer, Susan Hensler, who is compensated by the Pentagon. “He has been in custody for 16 years, which include the six months he put in in a C.I.A. black web page. We hope the United States makes superior on its guarantee to transfer him as soon as possible for the professional medical care he desperately needs.”