GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba _ The Pentagon said Monday it delivered two prisoners to Serbia, ending their more than 14 years of detention without charges and wrapping up a weekend of releases that downsized the captive population to 76.
One, a Tajik known here as Umar Abdulayev, 37, had been cleared for release by both Bush and Obama administration review panels but resisted repatriation. In 2009 he announced through his lawyer that he was so fearful of return that he'd rather spend the rest of his life on this remote base in southeast Cuba.
The other, a Yemeni named Mansoor al-Dayfi, in his mid-30s, was cleared for release by the inter-agency review panel in October. From 2010, he had been held as a "forever prisoner," a captive considered too dangerous to release but ineligible for trial until the board downgraded his dangerousness.
It was the second Defense Department transfer disclosure in 20 hours. Earlier, the Pentagon said that a Yemeni was being resettled in Italy. Neither Italy nor Serbia had offered sanctuary to a Guantanamo prisoner before. Now, 28 of the last 76 captives are approved for transfer with security assurances that satisfy Secretary of Defense Ash Carter.
A Pentagon statement called Abdulayev by a different name, Muhammadi Davlatov. He was the last Tajik in the prison of now 14 nationalities and left the base with the other two before dawn Saturday.
"I'm delighted for him. It took way too long, but it's an enormous victory that he would get out of Guantanamo, and he wouldn't go to Tajikistan," said Chicago attorney Matthew J. O'Hara, who seven years ago disclosed that Abdulayev feared repatriation more than spending the rest of his life in a Guantanamo cell.
The weekend releases to Italy and Serbia raised to 30 the number of countries that have resettled detainees for the Obama administration.
Part of it was the stigma of having been at Guantanamo, O'Hara said. Part of it was fears that Abdulayev's family came out on the wrong side of that nation's civil war.
Instead, O'Hara said the 37-year-old man who sports a long black ponytail wants to forge a career as a linguist or translator using the Arabic and English he learned in prison and the Tajik and Russian he learned before fleeing his homeland in 2001. He doesn't speak Serbian, but his attorney said "he's a sponge" in his ability to pick up languages.
He also wants to marry and have children, O'Hara said.
Leaked prison records indicate that U.S. troops brought both men to the crude open-air prison compound called Camp X-Ray on Feb. 9, 2002, the eighth shipment of captives from Afghanistan. In all, 34 men were brought to Guantanamo that day to raise the total of war-on-terror captives to 220.
Although they arrived on the same flight, and left together on a U.S. Air Force cargo plane, attorneys said they would not live together as they adjusted to their new surroundings.
In Washington, Secretary of State John Kerry issued a statement of gratitude to "the Republic of Serbia for offering humanitarian resettlement to two individuals formerly in U.S. custody at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba."
"This significant humanitarian gesture is consistent with Serbia's leadership on the global stage," Kerry said, adding that Serbia "joins 30 other countries which, since 2009, have extended resettlement opportunities to over 100 detainees."
Al-Dayfi wants a degree in information technology, said his New York attorney, Beth Jacob, who was at the base as the cargo plane took off before dawn Saturday.
"His focus now is on education," she said, adding that he got to the prison "very young, very afraid" after he was picked up in Afghanistan by the Northern Alliance. By Sunday, she heard the man who had sometimes joined prison fasts to protest his confinement was already in an apartment, had gone shopping and was in the company of two Serbians to help him adjust to his new circumstances.
In September, according to a Pentagon transcript, he told the national security Periodic Review Board that he had become a fan of American popular culture _ in particular Taylor Swift and the television shows "Boston Legal" and "Little House on the Prairie." He said he acquired his English fluency at the prison by reading the Jules Verne adventure novel "Around the World in 80 Days."
"He has been promised support for his education, which he is counting on," Jacob said, adding that he was a proficient English speaker.
At Guantanamo, he was among five "forever prisoners" who in 2013 designed a business plan for a Utopian "Yemen Milk and Honey Farm" to demonstrate plans for life after more than a decade in U.S. military detention. He's the second imaginary "milk and honey" farmer to get out.
The latest transfers come at a time of unhappiness by some members of Congress over the pace of releases, especially after a Syrian sent for resettlement in Uruguay has gone missing. Some speculate he left his host country.
The transfer released the last Tajik from the prison, which now holds men of 14 nationalities.
O'Hara said that the people had nothing to fear of Abdulayev after Guantanamo. "If you meet him he's completely charming and friendly and gracious and he just wants to get on with his life after all these years," he said. "I do think it's a good country for him and he's happy to be going there."
Said Jacob, who joined al-Dayfi at his parole-style hearing: "There is no reason to fear him _ he was never a fighter. And while his religion is important to him, he is pretty tolerant and _ as you can tell from his photograph, with the trimmed beard, for instance _ he is not extreme in his observances."
Co-counsel Carlos Warner, an Ohio public defender, said: "Mansoor is welcome in my home. He has overcome intolerable hardship and has grown as a man. He's an inspirational survivor."
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