“I have memories, but I don’t know if they’re mine, if they are accurate or not,” said Omar Khadr recently, recalling the events for which he was convicted by a U.S. military tribunal. Khadr, a Canadian citizen, spent almost nine years at Guantánamo Bay after being captured in Afghanistan at age 15.
His father, Egyptian-Canadian Ahmed Said Khadr, who had connections to Al Qaeda’s elite, sent Omar Khadr to Afghanistan to work mainly as an interpreter with those fighting U.S. forces who had dispersed the Taliban government in early 2002.
On July 27, 2002, in Khost, Afghanistan, Omar Khadr found himself in a firefight, during which grenades were tossed inside the compound where he had been staying. “And something just exploded beside me,” he said, in comments airing Monday in an Al Jazeera exclusive documentary. “I got tossed … 2 or 3 meters back,” he said. “I got up, and that’s when I lost my left eye, and my right eye was pretty badly damaged.”