Word: halim
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Front (NSF). The Front includes the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organization that for decades supported the violent overthrow of the Syrian government, but now says it seeks peaceful, democratic reform. (In Syria, however, membership in the Brotherhood is still punishable by death.) Another member of the NSF is Abdul Halim Khaddam, a former high-ranking Syrian official and Assad family loyalist who recently went into exile after a political clash with the regime. Representatives of the National Salvation Front, including Abdulhamid, were accorded at least two meetings earlier this year at the White House, which described the sessions as exploratory...
...part. Once the month of fasting began, I spotted many of these very same young people around the neighborhood, piously reincarnated with austere hairstyles and headscarves. I recognized one of the girls at the local square, as we stood in a pre-iftar [the Ramadan evening meal] line for halim, and asked her if the was actually observant, or just happened to like the seasonal wheat and turkey stew. "Oh, I adore fasting!" she said, as though professing to love truffles or the beach...
...Halim survived, remarkably, and I learned more of his troubled story. He had been in detention for almost a year. He'd attended college in Indiana and he spoke English, but he'd barely talked when he first arrived in Gitmo. He always had a dazed look, as if he didn't know where he was. Eventually the camp psychologist put the Bahraini on some heavy meds. Halim would fake taking his medication each day and hide the pills in his cell, planning to store up enough so he could take them all at once and end his life...
...Halim didn't speak in the weeks after the treatment. He just stared straight ahead. But the day the MPs were transferring detainees from Camp X-Ray to the newly built Camp Delta, Halim received another beating. Vanessa saw him two days after the move and noticed that his face was black and blue. She tried to investigate why Halim was IRFed the day of the move, but her questions went unanswered...
Soon after Halim got to Camp Delta, he tried to end his life again. He thought he could scrape enough paint chips off the cells to eat all at once and do himself in, but it only gave him an upset stomach. Then for a while it appeared that he was starting to improve--until the day he requested a razor in the shower, supposedly to shave his body hair. It seemed insane to me that a detainee who had twice tried to kill himself would be allowed to take a razor into the shower. But at this point, things...