March 2004: Alleged ‘High Value’ Al-Qaeda Leader Is Captured in Djibouti, Africa

Alleged “high value” al-Qaeda leader Gouled Hassan Dourad is captured. Dourad is captured by Djibouti government forces in his house in Djibouti. He is turned over to US custody at an unknown date and held as a ghost prisoner in the CIA’s secret prison system. On September 4, 2006, he will be transferred to the US-run prison in Guantanamo, Cuba, and will be officially declared a “high value” prisoner (see September 2-3, 2006).
Who Is Dourad? – Very little is publicly known about Dourad or why he is deemed an important militant leader. Virtually nothing has appeared about him in the media either before or after his capture. But his 2008 Guantanamo file will detail his history. According to that file, Dourad is a Somali who is an admitted member of both al-Qaeda’s East Africa branch and Al-Ittihad al-Islamiya (AIAI), an Islamist militant group based in Somalia that was blacklisted by the US shortly after 9/11. In 1993, he was granted asylum in Sweden, and lived there for nearly three years. In 1996, he trained in al-Qaeda linked training camps in Afghanistan. Returning to East Africa, he fought against Ethiopian forces for several years. Dourad grew more involved with al-Qaeda and took part in various plots. When he is caught, he allegedly is in the final stages of planning an operation against US military bases and various embassies in Djibouti. He does not seem to have been in frequent contact with many top al-Qaeda leaders, but it is claimed he worked closely with Abu Talha al-Sudani, a leader of al-Qaeda operations in East Africa. [US Department of Defense, 9/19/2008] Note that the Guantanamo files of prisoners often contain dubious information, and in some cases information that was extracted by torture (see April 24, 2011).