Zahir Hamdoun’s Periodic Review Board (PRB) proceedings are part of an administrative process the Obama administration established to review the cases of those Guantánamo detainees it has neither already approved for transfer nor intends to charge, in order to determine whether continued detention is necessary.

Zahir Hamdoun, a Yemeni citizen born in 1979 in Hadramout, Yemen, had been held without charge in Guantanamo for more than fourteen years. The fifth of eight children, Mr. Hamdoun grew up in a tight-knit, loving family. After graduating at the top of his high school class, he traveled to Afghanistan in 1999 to engage in dawah, the teaching of Islam, for six months while awaiting a college scholarship. Unable to return as planned amid turmoil in Afghanistan and Yemen, Mr. Hamdoun fled Afghanistan at the outset of the U.S. war and was seized months later in Karachi, Pakistan. During interrogations in Pakistan, he made statements under duress that he later recanted but that were relied upon by the U.S. government to justify his detention. He was transferred to the U.S. prison in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and then to Guantanamo in 2002, where he was detained without charge until his transfer to the United Arab Emirates on August 13, 2016.

The Obama administration designated dozens of men for indefinite detention in 2009 and promised to provide periodic reviews of their status beginning in 2011. Mr. Hamdoun’s turn for review by the administration’s Periodic Review Board came four years later, in December 2015. The Board approved him for transfer in January 2016. Despite spending more than a third of his life in Guantanamo, he continued to imagine a future beyond Guantanamo, using his time there to take classes in Life Skills, Art, English, Spanish, and Mathematics and to envision a new beginning. He looks forward to rebuilding his life.