“We congratulate you on the release of your son,” read the letter, which was imprinted with the seal of the United States Department of Defense and written in Arabic. “His case has been concluded and we have made a decision that he needs to be released.”
With that, $25 in cash and a new set of civilian clothes, the detainee, Alaq Khleirallah, 27, was back out onto the streets of Baghdad. He is one of roughly 90,000 detainees who have been released from American detention centers in the past six years, a process that will end sometime next year, when the last center is to be transferred to Iraqi control. Almost 10,000 detainees remain in American custody.
They have received a grim welcome. Many return to families crippled by debt from months without a breadwinner. Insurgents see them as potential recruits — or American agents. Old friends, neighbors and even relatives refuse to greet them in public, suspicious of their backgrounds or worried that a few minutes of socializing could mean guilt by association when the authorities, as Iraqi officials often intimate, come to round them back up.
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