Abdulhadi al-Iraqi

According to his lawyers, a CT scan performed in January 2017 pointed out the need for surgery. Camp authorities only scheduled his surgery after he couldn't feel his legs anymore and couldn't hold his urination or defecation.

On September 15, 2017, his lawyers announced that he needed another surgery on his spine and in his neck.

On April 27, 2007, it was reported that he was detained at Guantanamo Bay. He was previously held by the CIA. According to BBC News, US sources told them that al-Iraqi was arrested "late last year", meaning in 2006.

The Department of Defense announced on August 9, 2007, that all fourteen of the "high-value detainees" who had been transferred to Guantanamo from the CIA's black sites had been officially classified as "enemy combatants". Although judges Peter Brownback and Keith J. Allred had ruled two months earlier that only "illegal enemy combatants" could face military commissions, the Department of Defense waived the qualifier and said that all fourteen men could now face charges before Guantanamo military commissions.

On September 6, 2006, US President George W. Bush officially confirmed that the CIA maintained a secret network of overseas interrogation camps when he announced that fourteen "high value detainees", including al-Iraqi, had been transferred to Guantanamo, from those secret camps.

He had been wanted in Iraq since at least February 2005. The most recent U.S. State Department wanted poster said

The Newsweek article claimed that al-Iraqi brokered a 2005 reconciliation between Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Newsweek asserted that bin Laden had failed to anticipate the strength of the Iraqi's anti-occupation resistance and that he dispatched al-Iraqi to take charge of establishing an Al-Qaeda presence in the resistance. Newsweek asserted that Zarqawi had left a bad impression on his fellow veterans of the struggle to evict the Soviet invaders and that bin Laden didn't trust him. However, al-Iraqi recommended that Al-Qaeda would be better served by naming Zarqawi the head of Al-Qaeda in Iraq than by trying to compete with him for volunteers and establish a parallel effort—explaining the reconciliation.

It was reported in January 2002 that someone with the same pseudonyms, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi and Abu Abdullah, had been captured in Afghanistan. That person was also described as a training camp commander. However, despite these coincidences, the two suspects are now known to be distinct people.

A captured letter dated June 13, 2002, and thought to be from Saif al-Adel, mentions an Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi who is relatively senior in al-Qaeda and is at large (probably in Afghanistan) at the time of that writing. The US DoD statement says that Abdul-Hadi "during 2002–04, was in charge of cross-border attacks in Afghanistan" and that before his capture, he "was trying to return to his native country, Iraq, to manage al-Qai`da's affairs and possibly focus on operations outside Iraq against Western targets".

According to information about him provided by the Pentagon, Hadi was a key paramilitary commander in Afghanistan during the late 1990s before taking charge of cross-border attacks against the US and coalition troops from 2002 to 2004. He was accused of commanding attacks on Afghanistan coalition forces and involvement in plots to assassinate Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. Following the American invasion in 2001, he clashed with Ahmed Khadr arguing that front line battle would prove more useful than guerilla tactics around Shagai, Pakistan.

Al-Iraqi was born in Mosul to a Sunni Arab family in 1961. He speaks Arabic as his first language, and later learned Urdu, Pashto, Kurdish, and Persian. He served in the Iraqi Army, and fought for Iraq, during the Iran-Iraq War. Then he travelled to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet invasion.