Shaker Aamer remembers the frantic knocking on the door, the voices screaming for him to get out. Outside, in the dark streets of Jalalabad, eastern Afghanistan, the soldiers stripped him of his belongings at gunpoint and marched away their latest prisoner.
It was November 2001 and Afghanistan was the focus of the furious U.S. response to 9/11. The country that Aamer and his family had arrived in from London five months earlier had descended into chaos. The first U.S. bombing waves had flattened the Kabul school where Aamer had taught English to the children of Arabic-speaking expatriates. Terrified, the Aamers fled east toward Pakistan.
Aamer had more reason than many to escape. Even when he was traveling with his pregnant wife and three children, Afghan rebels belonging to the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, suspicious of all Arabs in the country, were likely to consider him a natural enemy.