The Al Ansar guest house is a name

Joint Task Force Guantanamo Joint Task Force Guantanamo (JTF-GTMO) is a U.S. military joint task force based at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba on the southeastern end of the base. JTF-GTMO falls under US Southern Command. Since January 2002 the command ha ...

counter-terrorism Counterterrorism (also spelled counter-terrorism), also known as anti-terrorism, incorporates the practices, military tactics, techniques, and strategies that governments, law enforcement, business, and intelligence agencies use to combat or ...

analysts have applied to several

guest houses A guest house (also guesthouse) is a kind of lodging. In some parts of the world (such as the Caribbean), guest houses are a type of inexpensive hotel-like lodging. In others, it is a private home that has been converted for the exclusive use ...

they consider suspicious. Close to one hundred

Guantanamo captive The Guantanamo Bay detention camp ( es, Centro de detención de la bahía de Guantánamo) is a United States military prison located within Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, also referred to as Guantánamo, GTMO, and Gitmo (), on the coast of Guant ...

s had their continued

extrajudicial detention Administrative detention is arrest and detention of individuals by the state without trial. A number of jurisdictions claim that it is done for security reasons. Many countries claim to use administrative detention as a means to combat terrorism ...

justified, at least in part, due to allegations that they had stayed in suspicious guest houses.

Location

JTF-GTMO allegations place guest houses named al Ansar in

Kabul Kabul (; ps, , ; , ) is the capital and largest city of Afghanistan. Located in the eastern half of the country, it is also a municipality, forming part of the Kabul Province; it is administratively divided into 22 municipal districts. Acco ...

Afghanistan Afghanistan, officially the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,; prs, امارت اسلامی افغانستان is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central Asia and South Asia. Referred to as the Heart of Asia, it is bordere ...

;

Peshawar Peshawar (; ps, پېښور ; hnd, ; ; ur, ) is the sixth most populous city in Pakistan, with a population of over 2.3 million. It is situated in the north-west of the country, close to the International border with Afghanistan. It is ...

Pakistan Pakistan ( ur, ), officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan ( ur, , label=none), is a country in South Asia. It is the world's fifth-most populous country, with a population of almost 243 million people, and has the world's second-lar ...

; and

Kandahar Kandahar (; Kandahār, , Qandahār) is a city in Afghanistan, located in the south of the country on the Arghandab River, at an elevation of . It is Afghanistan's second largest city after Kabul, with a population of about 614,118. It is the c ...

History

During the Russo-Afghan War, Osama bin Laden and

Abdullah Azzam Abdullah Yusuf Azzam ( ar, عبد الله يوسف عزام, translit=‘Abdu’llāh Yūsuf ‘Azzām; ) was a Salafi jihadist, a Palestinian scholar, and theologian of Sunni Islam. During the Soviet–Afghan War of the 1980s, he advocated " d ...

rented a house in University Town, Peshawar, which they named "Beit-al-Ansar" (the House of the Faithful). Here, with the approval of the

CIA The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gathering, processing, ...

, the ISI and the Saudi Istikhbarat, they established a logistics base for the thousands of Arab fighters arriving in the city. Bin Laden would vet the volunteers before assigning them to the various Afghan factions Burke, Jason, ''Fight to the death''

The Observer ''The Observer'' is a British newspaper published on Sundays. It is a sister paper to ''The Guardian'' and '' The Guardian Weekly'', whose parent company Guardian Media Group Limited acquired it in 1993. First published in 1791, it is the ...

, 28 October 2001 Bin Laden would lead religious debates, many centred on the

Sura Yasin Yā SīnGeorge Sale translates Y. S. (also Yaseen; ar, يٰسٓ, ; the letters 'Yāʼ' and ' Sīn') is the 36th chapter of the Quran (''sūrah''). It has 83 verses ('' āyāt''). It is regarded an earlier "Meccan surah". Some scholars maintai ...

of the

Qur'an The Quran (, ; Standard Arabic: , Quranic Arabic: , , 'the recitation'), also romanized Qur'an or Koran, is the central religious text of Islam, believed by Muslims to be a revelation from God. It is organized in 114 chapters (pl.: , s ...

which are reported to have played a pivotal role in the formation of the

al Qaida Al-Qaeda (; , ) is an Islamic extremist organization composed of Salafist jihadists. Its members are mostly composed of Arabs The Arabs (singular: Arab; singular ar, عَرَبِيٌّ, DIN 31635: , , plural ar, عَرَب, DIN 3 ...

network. Saad Al-Faqih, reported to be an expert on al Qaeda's history, has stated that al Qaeda's origin was tied to a computer system situated in the "bait al-Ansar guesthouse" : At the 2005 bail hearing for Hassan Almrei in Canada, an unidentified

Canadian Security Intelligence Service The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS, ; french: Service canadien du renseignement de sécurité, ''SCRS'') is Canada's primary national intelligence agency. It is responsible for collecting, analysing, reporting and disseminating int ...

(CSIS) agent named only as ''J.P.'' stated that Bayt al-Ansar had been "associated with al-Qaeda... since 1984", although even the most liberal estimates suggest that the group didn't even exist until 1988-1990.Transcripts of the testimony of prosecution witness Jamal Ahmad Al-Fadl delivered on the 6th, 7th and 13th February, 2001 at the United States District Court, Southern District of New York, in the trial of United States v. Usama bin Laden et al., defendants.
Retrieved 20 May 2007.Layden-Stevenson, Justice. "Hassan Almrei and the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration and Solicitor General for Canada", "Reasons for Order and Order", December 5, 2005

Allegations against Guantanamo captives that involve Al Ansar

According to the Summary of Evidence memo prepared for

Sabri Mohammed Ebrahim Al Qurashi A total of 133 Saudi citizens have been held in the United States' Guantanamo Bay detention camps at its naval base in Cuba since January 2002. Most had been swept up in Afghanistan following the US invasion in the fall of 2001, and they were clas ...

's first annual Administrative Review Board, on 26 July 2005: In the Summary of Evidence memo prepared for

Zuhail Abdo Anam Said Al Sharabi The United States has held a total of 115 Yemeni citizens at Guantanamo Bay, forty-two of whom have since been transferred out of the facility. Only Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia had a greater number of their citizens held in the Guantanamo Bay det ...

's Administrative Review Board hearings he faced the allegations: : According to a Summary of Evidence memo was prepared for

Abdullah Mohammed Khan According to the United States Department of Defense, it held more than two hundred Afghan detainees in Guantanamo prior to May 15, 2006. They had been captured and classified as enemy combatants in warfare following the US and allies' invasion ...

's first annual Administrative Review Board, on 29 July 2005. : According to the Summary of Evidence memo prepared for Jalal Salam Awad Awad's second annual Administrative Review Board, on 7 February 2006 : :

References

{{AfghanGuestHouse Al-Qaeda safe houses Al-Qaeda facilities Safe houses in Pakistan