Victoria Brittain

Moazzam Begg

Presents the experiences of Begg, a British citizen of Pakistani descent, focusing on his life from 2002, when he was taken by the CIA from his home in Islamabad, through his subsequent two-year imprisonment in Guantâanamo, to his release in 2005.

My Imprisonment at Guantánamo, Bagram, and Kandahar

Enemy Combatant

When Enemy Combatant was first published in the United States in hardcover in 2006 it garnered sensational reviews, and its author was featured in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, on National Public Radio, and on ABC News. A second generation British Muslim, Begg had been held by the U.S. military for more than three years before being released without charge in January of 2005. His memoir is the first published account by a Guantánamo detainee of life inside the infamous prison. Writing in the Washington Post Book World, Jane Mayer described Enemy Combatant as “fascinating . . . Begg provides some ideological counterweight to the one–sided spin coming from the U.S. government. He writes passionately and personally, stripping readers of the comforting lie that somehow the detainees aren’t really like us, with emotional attachments, intellectual interests and fully developed humanity.” Recommended by the Financial Times and Tikkun magazine and a ColorLines Editors’ Pick of Post–9/11 Books, Enemy Combatant is “a forcefully told, up-to-the-minute political story . . . necessary reading for people on all sides of the issue” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

My Imprisonment at Guantanamo, Bagram, and Kandahar

Moazzam Begg is an ordinary man who has endured an extraordinary fate -- imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit and whose precise nature has never been determined. As far as the US government was concerned, it was enough to label him an 'enemy combatant'. Moazzam was arrested in Pakistan, where he was helping set up education programmes for children, in the panic-stricken months after the 9/11 attacks. He spent three years in prison, much of it in solitary confinement, and was subjected to over three hundred interrogations, death threats and torture, witnessing the killings of two detainees. He was released early in 2005 without explanation or apology. ENEMY COMBATANT is his riveting story. Not just an instant classic of incarceration literature, it reveals for the first time what it means to be an intelligent, engaged Muslim living in the West after 9/11, by someone who has recently emerged as an influential voice in the Muslim community, against both acts of terrorism and the demonising of Islam.

Moazzam Begg

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