GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba — The U.S. prison at Guantanamo houses a collection of prisoners who were seized all over the world, in places like Azerbaijan, Kenya, Thailand and Turkey, mostly by foreign forces.

Fifteen years after U.S. Marines opened Camp X-Ray with 20 captives flown from Afghanistan, just one of the prisoners was captured by U.S. troops in a classic combat zone. He’s an Afghan and has been cleared for release as a victim of mistaken identity.

With President-elect Donald Trump taking authority over the prison that President George W. Bush created and President Obama could not close, the population today reflects both the global scale of the conflict the U.S. waged after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and the unorthodox nature of the battlefield.

All are Muslim. None is American. A third aren’t Arab. Moreover, just 10 of the last 55 prisoners were captured in Afghanistan, a Miami Herald study has found.

Yemeni Tawfiq al Bihani, who has been cleared for release since 2009, is a case in point.

He fled Afghanistan as U.S. troops invaded, made it to Pakistan and then Iran, which turned him over to Afghanistan security forces, who in turn gave him to the U.S. military, according to his lawyer and leaked U.S. documents.

“He’s never been in a battlefield in his life,” said attorney George Clarke, who called him “a failed recruit” of al-Qaida’s al Farouq training base near Kandahar, Afghanistan.

The Saudi-born Yemeni is described by his lawyer as a former hashish addict who ran away from home to join a genuine jihadi brother, Mansur, who was also captured in Iran but released rather than returned to Afghanistan. Mansur did return to an al-Qaida war zone – Somalia – and was killed in a battle in 2011.

Meanwhile, Tawfiq went from an Iranian prison to an Afghan prison to U.S. custody and wound up in a CIA black site for about 50 days before he was sent to Guantanamo, according to the portion of the Senate’s Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program – known as the Torture Report – that was released in 2015.

In that regard, he is not unusual among the last captives of Guantanamo. Nearly half of them, not just the high-value detainees Bush ordered taken to the base in 2006, spent a month or more in the secret CIA prison network before they were sent to the U.S. prison.

The Bush administration opened the prison with 20 “worst of the worst” captives flown in from Afghanistan on Jan. 11, 2002 – four months after the 9/11 attacks killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, at the Pentagon and Pennsylvania. A Navy photographer captured the manacled and masked men kneeling in the open-air compound called Camp X-Ray, framing a narrative of captives caught in combat that still captures the world’s imagination today – even though it’s not true.

“Many of them were not captured in the course of shootouts with American forces,” said Columbia Law School professor Matthew Waxman, who oversaw detainee policy at the Pentagon in 2004 and 2005.

The Bush and Obama administrations “embraced a very broad understanding of the battlefield,” Waxman said, one that extended far from the “places where U.S. military forces are actively engaged in combat” to sites around the world “where al-Qaida is operating from in significant ways.”

“The boundaries of that idea have never been clearly defined,” he said.

The prison enters its 16th year with just two of those first 20 “worst of the worst” still here: Yemeni Ali Hamza al Bahlul, the prison’s lone convict, and Tunisian Ridah bin Saleh al Yazidi, who has been cleared to go since at least 2009 but whom no country has agreed to take. The rest were released, like 725 others who passed through the prison, in a transfers negotiated by both the Bush administration Waxman served and the Obama administration that failed to achieve the outgoing commander in chief’s goal of closing the prison. Bush released about 540 of them; Obama resettled or repatriated close to 200.

Pakistani forces captured Bahlul and Yazidi in an Afghan border region after the battle of Tora Bora, according to prison and court records. U.S. intelligence would profile them as suspected bodyguards of Osama bin Laden, part of a group called the Dirty 30, and Bahlul was convicted of war crimes for making recruiting videos and other activities in the service of bin Laden.

But first they spent a week or more as Pakistani detainees, something that more than half the remaining captives have in common.

Some prisoners were taken captive in a joint operation by U.S. and Pakistani intelligence services. A combined team seized the alleged 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, in Rawalpindi in March 2003, according to Terry McDermott, the investigative journalist and author of “The Hunt for KSM.”

The April 2003 arrests of two other alleged 9/11 plotters in Karachi, Pakistan, Mohammed’s nephew Ammar al Baluchi, and Walid bin Attash, were more typical, resulting from a unilateral Pakistani operation that turned them over to the CIA.

All three men got to Guantanamo in September 2006 from CIA black sites, something that 26 of the last 55 prisoners also have in common.

The 2015 Senate study of the spy agency’s secret prison network shows that the longest-held CIA prisoner now at the U.S. Navy base prison is Zayn al Abdeen Mohammed al Hussein, known as Abu Zubaydah. He was sent to Guantanamo after 1,610 days in a CIA black site. A Yemeni known as Hani Saleh Rashid Abdullah was held for the shortest time, about 30 days in CIA custody, after the Pakistanis captured him in a series of raids in Karachi that resulted in the capture of another alleged 9/11 plotter, Ramzi bin al Shibh.

Of the first “worst of the worst,” former Guantanamo intelligence director Mark Fallon said last year, most “weren’t battlefield captives” at all. He called them “bounty babies,” men handed over by Afghan warlords or Pakistani security forces and sent to Guantanamo “on the sketchiest bit of intelligence with nothing to corroborate.”

Trump campaigned on a pledge to load the prison up “with bad dudes,” which leads to the question of who might supply the next load of captives.

Allies in the battle against the Islamic State? U.S. law enforcement handing over suspected homegrown terrorists? Pirates picked up at sea by the U.S. or allies? No such captives have been taken to Guantanamo before. Both Waxman and his successor at the Bush administration, Cully Stimson, caution that this should be approached with care.

“For a long time, we haven’t been in that position. I think it became too difficult and costly. Politically costly. Legally costly. Operationally costly. It became easier to say, if Country X captures an al-Qaida planner, let’s work our relationship with Country X to make sure we’re getting access to the intelligence,” Waxman said.

“Any new category that you try to bring there would really carry tremendous litigation risk,” he said, an invitation to the federal courts to question military-detention authority.

And it comes down to the meaning of “the battlefield” today.

“I think the term ‘battlefield’ means very different things to very different people,” Waxman said. “I have no idea what it means to Donald Trump.”

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