Lawyers for an American citizen, recently released from an Iraqi prison following a terrorism-related sentence, say the man has been newly detained in Turkey at the behest of the U.S. government.
In a petition filed Tuesday in federal court in Washington, D.C., attorneys for Shawki Ahmad Sharif Omar, who was born in Kuwait but naturalized as a U.S. citizen in the 1980s, allege that the U.S. is working with Turkish officials to keep him from reentering the United States. He is being held in a Turkish “deportation facility,” but Omar’s lawyers argue that he is effectively in the “constructive custody” of the U.S. government, and they are asking a federal judge to order his release and return.
The case was assigned to U.S. District Judge John Bates, an appointee of George W. Bush.
Omar, who is also a Jordanian citizen, was arrested by U.S. forces in Iraq in 2004 for allegedly providing aid to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, then the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq. He drew international attention after describing abuse and torture he experienced while in U.S. military custody. After the U.S. delivered him to Iraqi authorities in 2011, he was convicted of immigration violations and — several years later — terrorism charges that kept him in jail until this past April.
In all, Omar has spent most of the past 22 years in detention facilities and prisons. His backstory is both complicated and opaque, shrouded by layers of government secrecy and records of decades-old court proceedings. Evidence supplied by the U.S. government during a 2008 Supreme Court fight stemming from efforts to send him to Iraqi custody portrayed Omar as a key fixer for Zarqawi “facilitating his group’s connection with other terrorist groups, bringing foreign fighters into Iraq, and planning and executing kidnappings.”
But his allies have claimed the U.S. evidence for those allegations was flimsy and never corroborated. Omar and his allies have also claimed the Iraqi legal proceedings were unfair and deprived him of due process. His case has made international headlines for years.
Omar’s attorneys say he was issued a temporary U.S. passport after his release from Iraqi custody in April but that he was nevertheless added to the no-fly list and barred from traveling to the U.S. to reunite with his family — which includes his wife and U.S. citizen children.
The U.S. has broad latitude to include even its citizens on the no-fly list, a secretive list of individuals believed to pose a risk to U.S. national security given their affiliations, foreign travel and other personal information. But Omar’s claim that the Turkish authorities are holding him at the behest of the United States raise new questions about the legal authority of the U.S. to cooperate with foreign governments on border security and migration goals.
It is unusual for the U.S. to ask another country to detain a U.S. citizen as a way to bar their re-entry, regardless of their criminal record.
Turkish officials detained Omar and sent him to a deportation center, where he has been for the last week at an unknown facility, according to his petition. The filing claims that the officials told Omar that they were acting on a request from U.S. authorities. The complaint includes text of correspondence with State Department officials who acknowledged Omar’s detention and said they were working with Turkish counterparts to verify his well-being.
“The government cannot now argue that it lacks control over Petitioner’s detention when it has affirmatively exercised its authority to intervene on his behalf,” his lawyers wrote.
They argued that Omar is “in danger of being deported to a country where he faces a real risk of torture including Jordan — a country that has interrogated his family members about his whereabouts and activities or being subjected to torture in Türkiye at the behest of the United States in light of the fact that he has already once been turned over to a country that tortured him, by United States officials.”
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Transportation Security Agency and accordingly the no-fly list, directed POLITICO to the FBI, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The State Department and the U.S. Embassy in Turkey also didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Omar’s lawyer, Curtis Doebbler, declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation.
The argument by Omar’s lawyers is similar to one raised by more more than 100 Venezuelan nationals who were abruptly deported to El Salvador last year after President Donald Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act to label them members of a violent transnational gang. Though they were quickly transported to Salvadoran custody — despite efforts by a federal judge to block the transfer — the men claimed they were still in the “constructive custody” of the United States, claiming the Trump administration had the power to bring them back.
It is also the latest juncture in a nearly two-decade legal fight for Omar. Omar has claimed he and his then-pregnant wife were tortured at Abu Ghraib prison, a U.S.-run detention facility 20 miles from Baghdad where service members and U.S. intelligence officers were accused of serious abuses, including sexual abuse and torture of inmates. The lawsuit claims Omar received a settlement from the U.S. government for his experiences at Abu Ghraib.
In 2011, he was transferred to Iraqi custody and convicted on charges he was part of a “illegitimate group” and entered the country illegally — even though he entered with his U.S. passport (that was in the possession of U.S. authorities). The witness whose testimony undergirded Omar’s conviction on the charges he was part of an “illegitimate group” recanted subsequently.
Courts have previously ruled against the U.S. government when it has infringed on the rights of U.S. citizens accused of ties to terrorist organizations. In 2018, a U.S. court ruled in favor of a dual U.S.-Saudi citizen accused of fighting on behalf of ISIS in Syria, who the U.S. had tried to send to another country — presumably Saudi Arabia.
