MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay – Six prisoners held for 12 years at Guantanamo Bay began their new lives in Uruguay after the United States flew them to the South American country as refugees amid a renewed push by President Barack Obama to close the prison.
Uruguayan President Jose Mujica agreed to accept the men as a humanitarian gesture and said they would be given help getting established in a country of 3.3 million with a total Muslim population of perhaps 300 people.
The six men — four Syrians, a Tunisian and a Palestinian — were detained as suspected militants with ties to al-Qaeda in 2002 but were never charged. They had been cleared for release since 2009 but could not be sent home and the U.S. struggled to find countries willing to take them.
Among those transferred was Abu Wa'el Dhiab, a 43-year-old Syrian on a long-term hunger strike protesting his confinement who was at the center of a legal battle in U.S. courts over the military's use of force-feeding.
A lawyer for Dhiab, Cori Crider of the human rights group Reprieve, said on Sunday that her client was taken to a hospital in Uruguay for a medical checkup and has his wife's telephone number to talk to his family for the first time as a free man.
"Despite years of suffering, Mr. Dhiab is focused on building a positive future for himself in Uruguay," said Crider, who traveled to Montevideo to meet with him. "He looks forward to being reunited with his family and beginning his life again."
Crider said that Dhiab was eating. "He is obviously tired and he is not 100 percent healthy just yet but there was a sound, that kind of indescribable sound of hope in his voice in a way that just hadn't been there at all."
The Pentagon identified the other Syrians sent to Uruguay on Saturday as Ali Husain Shaaban, 32; Ahmed Adnan Ajuri, 37; and Abdelahdi Faraj, 33. Also released were Palestinian prisoner Mohammed Abdullah Taha Mattan, 35, and 49-year-old Adel bin Muhammad El Ouerghi of Tunisia.
"We are very grateful to Uruguay for this important humanitarian action, and to President Mujica for his strong leadership in providing a home for individuals who cannot return to their own countries," U.S. State Department envoy Clifford Sloan said.
Uruguay's government issued a statement confirming the arrival, but officials gave no other details on the transfers.
Ramzi Kassem, a lawyer for Faraj, said he was "deeply grateful" to Uruguay for accepting the prisoner.
"By welcoming our client and the others as refugees and free men, not as prisoners, Uruguay has shown that it truly possesses the courage of its convictions," Kassem, a law professor at the City University of New York, said in an interview from Panama.
Uruguay already has taken in 42 Syrian civil war refugees, who arrived in October, and has said it will take about 80 more.
They are coming to what may be the only country in the Americas without an Islamic mosque, said Tamar Chaky, director of the Islamic Cultural Organization of Uruguay. He promised that the local Muslim community would welcome them, but said there had been no contact with the government.
The U.S. has now transferred 19 prisoners out of Guantanamo this year, all but one of them within the last 30 days, and 136 remain, the lowest number since shortly after the prison opened in January 2002. Officials say several more releases are expected by the end of the year.
Obama administration officials had been frustrated that the transfer took so long, blaming outgoing Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel for not approving the move sooner. They said after Mujica agreed to take the men in January, the deal sat for months on Hagel's desk, awaiting his signature as required by law. The Pentagon didn't send the notification of the transfer to Congress until July.
By then, the transfer had become an issue in Uruguay's presidential election and officials there decided to postpone it until after the vote. Tabare Vazquez, a member of Mujica's ruling coalition, won a runoff election on Nov. 30.
Upon taking office, Obama had pledged to close the prison but was blocked by Congress, which banned sending prisoners to the U.S. for any reason, including trial, and placed restrictions on sending them abroad.
The U.S. now holds 67 men at Guantanamo who have been cleared for release or transfer but, like the six sent to Uruguay, can't go home because they might face persecution, a lack of security or some other reason.
Prisoners from Guantanamo have been sent around the world but this weekend's transfer was the largest group sent to the Western Hemisphere. Four Guantanamo prisoners were sent to Bermuda in 2009 and two were sent to El Salvador in 2012 but have since left.
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Ben Fox wrote from Miami. Associated Press writers Nedra Pickler in Washington and Luis Andres Henao in Santiago, Chile, contributed to this report.
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