Gul Yacoob, in Black Jail47 Gul was studying in class 10 and was only 16 years old in 2010 when he was caught by the American forces and sent to Bagram. Prior to this, Gul had been recruited by a religious organization that encourages its members to travel and proselytize. Referring to a religious group in general, he recounted ‘some “Tablighi” people’ in the mosque near his house encouraging him to fight for the cause of Islam.48 As part of his grooming, Gul said he was shown videos of US soldiers purportedly killing innocent people and was convinced by other members at the local mosque to travel to Afghanistan and fight to protect Islam. He said the videos they were shown were of Americans killing poor people, so Gul decided that he wanted to engage in jihad against the Americans and fight for Muslims. Gul was sent to the Black Jail for twenty-five days upon his arrival in Bagram. Despite being only a teenager, he was jailed with adult detainees like other underaged prisoners, Shakil and Yusuf Hamid, and subjected to the same forms of interrogation and torture. In Black Jail, officials repeatedly asked why he had travelled to Afghanistan. When Gul gave what he felt were found to be dissatisfactory answers, the interrogators became angry. They threatened to torture him, stopped giving him food, and retaliated by throwing a copy of the Quran on the floor. Gul said, “I had no answers for these questions and most of the times I kept quiet.” These were acts clearly meant to outrage the sensibilities of a Muslim detainee. A number of detainees reported the guards’ use of ridiculing religious, faith-based, and devotional practices as an interrogation tactic and method of abuse. They resorted to this tactic seeing the detainees on the one hand, stereotypically, as a community bound to faith, while using their reactions to prove detainees fit a terrorist ‘type’. Despite these forms of humiliation, meant to spur outbursts, Gul held on to his faith, in collective acts of resistance and personal self-preservation, committing the Quran to memory while learning its translation from his fellow inmates. Gul was repatriated from Bagram prison to Pakistan in May 2014. Upon return, he was taken to Peshawar where he was detained for five days before being sent home to Kurram Agency in FATA. He reported being asked to pay a bribe of 25,000 PKR (USD 160) to the Political Agent in order to process his transfer. Further detained in Kurram for 10 days, he was also interrogated by local authorities before being released. Finally home with his family in 2014, he complained of suffering from stomach pains, the causes of which remained undiagnosed, along with experiencing recurring nightmares about his detention. “I have stomach pain but I don’t take medicines because I took a lot of medicines in Bagram. I see bad dreams and still feel that I am in prison and a plane will come to take me back to Bagram.” Though Gul wanted to pursue an education, he could not afford school fees. Instead, he studied the Quran regularly at the madrasa near his house.  Black Jail was a separate facility from the DFIP, in which the harshest forms of interrogation took place, along with extreme forms of torture. 48  Here, in the semantics of his phrasing, it is important to note that Gul was not referring to the official religious organization, the Tablighi Jamaat that Usman joined (see page 28). Whereas Gul mentioned the kind of violent videos that were used to indoctrinate him, the Tablighi Jamaat is well-known as a nonviolent group and this is not the kind of material it would circulate or use to spread its ideas. Shireen Khan Burki. “The Tablighi Jama’at: Proselytizing Missionaries or Trojan Horse?” Journal of Applied Security Research. 8:1. 2013. 47 40