A Kuwaiti man who complained about maltreatment during a three-year stay in the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was involved in a deadly suicide bombing in northern Iraq last month, the U.S. military confirmed yesterday.
Abdallah Salih al-Ajmi, 29, whom the U.S. military accused of fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan and wanting to kill Americans, was involved in one of three suicide bombings that killed seven Iraqi security forces in Mosul on April 26, Defense Department officials said.
They said that after his release in Kuwait, Ajmi traveled to Iraq via Syria -- a common way for foreign fighters to enter Iraq through porous borders. Military officials said Ajmi's motives were unclear, but in a lengthy martyrdom audio recording before his death, Ajmi implores people to take part in suicide bombings to attack Americans.
In portions of the recording translated by the Bethesda-based SITE Intelligence Group, Ajmi decries the conditions at Guantanamo as "deplorable" and urges others to fight.
"Whoever can join them and execute a suicide operation, let him do so. By God, it will be a mortal blow," Ajmi says. "The Americans complain much about it. By God, in Guantanamo, all their talk was about explosives and whether you make explosives. It is as if explosives were hell to them."