The Road to Guantanamo

Event information

The Road to Guantanamo: Michael Winterbottom's Silver Bear winning film documents the personal accounts of Ruhal Ahmed, Asif Iqbal and Shafiq Rasul - three young British men from Tipton in the West Midlands of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origins who travelled to Pakistan in September 2001 just days after the September 11 terrorist attacks in the USA, ostensibly to a wedding of a friend of theirs. While staying at a mosque in Karachi, the three decided to take a rash and dangerous trip to Afghanistan to see first-hand the encounters of the region. Mixing interviews with the three men themselves and archive news footage from the period, the film contains an account of the three men's experiences from their travels into Afghanistan and to their capture and imprisonment. In January 2002, the 'Tipton Three' were declared "enemy combatants" by the US military, and flown with dozens of other alleged Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where they remained for the next two years. They were held in mostly solitary confinement without charge or legal representation.