HOWZAT

Taleban sources told The Times that even if the Americans had not discovered Rasoul’s identity his Afghan interrogators should have done. “In the time of the Taleban government he was the commander of Taleban forces in Takhar province,” a Taleban official told The Times. “He was one of Mullah Omar’s deputies.”

Before September 11, 2001, Takhar was the front line between Taleban forces and the Northern Alliance.

Rasoul was caught in nearby Kunduz in December 2001 from a car that he claimed to be driving for another Taleban leader, “Mohammed” — an apparent reference to Mullah Mohammed Fakil, his commander, who was attempting to surrender to the Northern Alliance.

Fakil, the Taleban’s deputy defence minister, accused of some of the regime’s worst atrocities, remains in Guantánamo, classified as too dangerous to release.

Sixteen pages of documents detailing Rasoul’s detention and interrogation at Guantánamo Bay offer tantalising clues into his personality.

He did not confess to being a senior military commander, although the details sometimes wavered. Some of his denials were astonishingly brazen: that the Kalashnikov was forced on him; that he was carrying the watches for a commander who had no pockets; that he had never heard of Osama bin Laden and did not know that the Americans were bombing Afghanistan; that he came to Kabul in 1997, when the Taleban seized power, merely “to see the city”.

As the years of incarceration dragged on, he grew wearier, more sullen, and palpably annoyed with being asked the same questions. “I don’t want to talk about the Kalashnikov,” he barked at one hearing of the board reviewing his status.

During one hearing in 2005, the interrogator noted that he was wearing an orange jumpsuit, by then only worn by non-compliant inmates involved in a disciplinary process. Rasoul said that he had argued with guards “because they disrespected my Koran”. The guards’ allegedly deliberate mistreatment of the Muslim holy book sparked hunger strikes in Guantánamo, in which Rasoul appeared to have participated: records of Detainee 008’s weight show that it plummeted in September 2005, at the height of the hunger strikes.

Another dispute was over cleanliness. “I was trying to get permission to take a shower daily,” he complained. “Right now I am taking one within every three days.”

He claimed that he relished the punitive solitary confinement. “I don’t want anyone to talk to me, I am happy here.”

He did admit to having joined the Taleban twice in the course of seven years — once, under duress, in 1995, and the second time in 1997, to get proper medical treatment for injuries sustained in a bombing.

The full text of the decision to release him has not been declassified, but documents show that the decision was unanimous. Factors favouring his release included his professed ignorance of Osama bin Laden, his assertion that he had been conscripted into the Taleban and had never been to a training camp and his promise that he intended to return to a peaceful life in Afghanistan.

“I want to go back home and join my family and work in my land and help my family,” he said.

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