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May 9, 2003
Tales of Saddam's Brutality
The Disappeared: Living with the Terror
The Disappeared: Living with the Terror
Five of Kareem's eight sons were killed
or disappeared during those weeks, including 21-year-old Mohie,
who was shot dead during the demonstrations. The military took Mohie's body to the morgue where it was kept along with
dozens of others for two months. During
that time, Kareem, a devout Muslim, searched for Mohie's
body to give him a proper funeral. By then, security agents had hauled off four
other sons and thrown the whole family in jail for five days while pursuing the
uprising's leaders. The sons have never returned.
The Washington Post, May 5, 2003
-------
Rasmia Jasim's
12-year hunt for eight relatives, including two brothers and a son, brought her
to the pit today from the village of Hashmia, 12 miles to the east,
where a man passed through the mosques on Saturday announcing the discovery of
a large grave. We are looking for an
identification card, some clothes, anything, Jasim
said, peering down on a knee-high pile of bones. I am very confused.
The Washington Post, May 5, 2003
-------
In a vast, anonymous graveyard outside of one of Iraq's most notorious
prisons, where the cellblocks and the gallows now sit empty, Dr. Abdul Jabbar Faleh searches for grave
number 236. His brother, an engineer,
was arrested in 1980, accused by the Baath Party of
illegal political activism. Dr. Faleh never knew what happened to his brother until Saddam
Hussein's regime toppled, unlocking an avalanche of documents. A group of former inmates calling themselves
the Free Iraqi Prisoner Society has compiled this enormous, jumbled archive
of organized atrocity. In their mundane,
administrative way, they tell horrible stories.
A picture of a man who has been tortured. A death sentence for 74 men accused of being
in an Islamic political party.
Volunteers sift through the files and every day, put out a list of
prisoners' names and execution dates.
Hundreds of families come to pore over the lists, each with their own
story. Some find not only a name and a
date, but also the location and number of a grave.
ABC World News Tonight, May 5, 2003
-------
One
of the darkest chapters was written in the compound housing Iraq's Internal Security Service,
the most feared place in Iraq for ordinary citizens. For
most detainees landing inside, the prison represented no less than the end of
the earth. Although the cells are empty now, they continue to cry out to the
living.
You
the respectable one reading this know that we are not guilty of any real crime,
only a trumped-up charge. And we will be getting out, if God wills it, writes
one prisoner.
In
Iraq, we have a saying that when you are taken
inside [the security compound], you are a dead person. And if you manage to get
out, it is as if escaping from the mouth of the lion, says the
interpreter. A former officer in the
Iraqi military, the interpreter asks that he not be identified by name out of
concern that he might face retribution by former security officials for simply
being in this place.
Allah
save me, is the only message left by one prisoner in the maximum- security
section of the detention facility. Although most of the cells have been cleaned
out by looters, there are still wallets, birth certificates, and identification
cards on the floor at the intake office near the prison entrance.
Some
simply sign the walls. Farris Ebrahim. Walid Sayed Ali al-Karbali. Hader Jawadi.
They
don't think they are coming out, so they leave their name, the interpreter
says. They hope that someone will write it down later like you are doing
now.
Christian Science Monitor, May 5, 2003
-------
Mohamed's
mother, Hadiya Saied, was
40 years old when Saddam Hussein's police came to their home in the
neighborhood called Dialah and arrested her and his
13-year-old sister, Jinan. The
sister he has never seen was born to his mother while she was in prison.
Her name is Aliay.
According
to government files, the mother was executed in prison and the girls
died there, too. But because their bodies have not been found, Mohamed and his
family continue to hope.
In the case of Mohamed's family,
police were looking for a male cousin, accusing him of being part of the banned
Al-Dawa party. When they could not find him -- he had
fled to Syria and then to Iran -- the police took his
pregnant mother and his sister.
The Baltimore Sun, May 6,
-------
Rasmi Jasim hunted through the piles of earth near Babylon for her son Haider
Abdul Hadi Shabeeb, who was
16 when he was taken away by members of the Ba'ath
party in 1991. Mrs Jasim,
52, said she had also lost two brothers, three nephews and a son-in-law. They had just been sitting in the house.
They were handcuffed and taken away, she said. I came here at six in the
morning to see if I could recognise anyone but I can't. I don't know if they
are here. They didn't have ID cards.
The Guardian (London),
May 5, 2003 -------
God, please
avenge me against Saddam, cries Awad, a Shiite, who
has just found his brother's name is on a 20-year-old list of executions. Saddam killed all the good men in Iraq, he says.
Some of the darkest secrets of Saddam's regime, of torture and mass
killings, were kept here, at the Abu Ghraib prison,
where, over the years, thousands of Iraqi prisoners, mostly political
prisoners, virtually disappeared behind these walls, tortured in these
chambers, hung by their arms from hooks, then burned and beaten. And if they still didn't confess, hanged
here, two at a time, dozens a week. Some
Iraqi families are finding along with unearthed remains a little peace. But it will likely take as many decades to
heal their suffering as it did for Iraqis to learn the brutal truth.
NBC Nightly News, May 6, 2003
-------
Hisham was given a grave number, 372, told his
son was executed a decade ago, and buried here, in a makeshift graveyard
outside Baghdad.
But he finds no 372, and there's no way of knowing which remains are his
son's. Yards away, Mohammed finds the
graves of his two missing brothers, 156 and 206. Almost a month after Saddam's fall, the scope
of his brutality is only beginning to surface.
Already these mass graves, containing hundreds, perhaps thousands, of
Saddam's enemies, from ethnic Kurds in the north to Shiites in the south, are a
gruesome testimony to a regime that thrived on cruelty and fear.
NBC Nightly News, May 5, 2003
Mr. Hani came to a cemetery
here today, like dozens of other Iraqis, not with the name of his dead brother
but with a number. Satter's number was 535. A cousin,
Sagur, arrested at the same time, was 537.
These numbers were what was left of people convicted
as enemies of Saddam Hussein and then made to disappear. Their graves were not
dignified with names but with numbers painted on metal plates. The plates
spread like rusty weeds, covering more and more feet of desert every year Mr.
Hussein held power.
But now that he is gone, the families of the
disappeared are finding the numbers, matching them to the metal plates and
finally collecting their dead. These
were people executed - most by hanging in the fearsome Abu Ghraib
prison a mile away - merely because the government considered them a threat.
Many were Shiite Muslims more active in their religion than the Sunni-dominated
government felt it could tolerate.
Report
on Al Qarah Cemetery
The New York Times, April 25, 2003
------
My brother disappeared in 1992, this woman
told us. We never heard another thing
from him. He and hundreds of others
buried here were Shiite Muslims, Saddams religious
enemy. Witnesses say they were dumped in
the middle of the night, without the dignity of a coffin, often mixed with the
bones of another. Until this week, their
whereabouts were unknown. But now, armed
with shovels and mysterious scraps of paper, families are finally coming to
reclaim their own. These people may have
been just nameless, faceless victims to the regime, but if so, the question
arises why would the regime have taken so much time to bury each one
individually, and then mark each grave with a number? The answer:
The regime didnt keep track. The
cemeterys caretaker did. There must be
thousands of people in this book.
Thousands of names. Under penalty
of death, this man stole Saddam Husseins execution list and kept note of the
bodies that came his way.
I suffered so many years, he said. My hair turned white from the pain and
guilt. But now he is free to tell, and
when we went to visit him there was a line out the door, all people looking to
match a name with his secret numbers. It is an act of courage that may finally
bring some peace to families with homecomings so long overdue.
CBS Evening News, April 24, 2003
------
We found one of our friends and we are trying to find the others.
People told us that they were killed here, said Ali Khaled
Shefeq, 40, a chemical engineer, digging at the grave
with a spade. He said relatives suspect the men were killed around April 2
less than a week before Baghdad fell
.
We all feel very sad, Shefeq said. They are
brothers. What can we say? God bless them. Until now, we didnt believe Saddam
Hussein is gone, that its over. We pray he will never come back again.
Others
searching for bodies said they were looking for the remains of eight men who
were seized at a mosque a month ago by a paramilitary group loyal to
Hussein. A cry went up from the crowd as
one of the decomposed bodies was unearthed.
Its Abdul Rahman, its Abdul Rahman, people in the crowd shouted.
Newsday,
April 23, 2003
------
Jamal
al-Attar was 26 years old when the Iraqi Mukhabarat
snatched him off the street for questioning. He was accused of being a
resistance fighter opposed to Iraqs invasion of Kuwait. Then he was loaded onto a truck with
scores of other Kuwaitis. That was the last anyone here [Kuwait] saw of him. Today, Mr. Attar would be 38 years old and
would have spent one-third of his life in an Iraqi prison. I must say that I
hope that he is still alive. I hope that all of them are still alive, says
Abdul Hamid al-Attar, Jamals father. But I have to
be frank with myself. I am not that much optimistic.
Most difficult, say
family members, is not knowing whether their loved ones are alive.
If Hussein
did this to his own people, the Kuwaitis received worse, family members say.
We wish that all of
them are alive and all of them will be returned soon to Kuwait but if not, [their families] should
know the truth, says Ali Murad of the National
Committee for the Missing and POWs.
Attar
agrees: Five or six years ago, we used to insist they are alive and that the
Iraqis must bring them back to Kuwait alive. Now we have changed. We say we
must know if they are dead or alive but we cant accept that they are
missing.
The
Christian Science Monitor, April 22, 2003
------
There is nothing in this tunnel, save for
rats and sodden fruit crates. But
across town, at another portal to the subterranean maze, a morsel of
information has floated to the surface. It's a piece of paper, part of a
security file. It reads: Ali Shankat. Executed criminal. Accused of writing about Saddam
Hussein.
Report on Iraqi Prisons
Toronto Star, April 21, 2003
------
The relatives push forward, waving their faded pictures, in much the
same way that desperate kinfolk had wandered around the ruins of the World Trade Center towers after 9/11, seeking information about
their missing. Haid
Ahmed holds up a photograph of his brother, Moayed,
an agriculture student who disappeared in June, 1981. We haven't been able to search for him until
now. We were too scared even to try.
Too scared, in the Saddam days, to even inquire about Moayed's fate.
My brother could be anywhere. This is just a possibility. But any place
I hear there is a prison, I go there. I have been to four prisons already. I am
going to keep looking because my father and mother have asked me to. We have talked about him every day since he
was taken. His life inside prison is now longer than his life outside. In my
heart, I think he is alive, but only God knows.
Toronto Star, April
21, 2003
------
Rousted from their beds, pulled off the street, yanked from their
classrooms and their jobs, essentially abducted by the president's security
goons and on the most feeble of pretexts, never again seen by their families
and friends. Mourned furtively down through the years by parents and siblings,
spouses and children.
They are the missing, probably long dead and thus mercifully released
from their misery. But hope lives on, however atrophied and threadbare. It is
this hopeful longing for miracles that brings Iraqis, in their pleading
numbers, to every portal, hatchway and unsealed vent hole, in search of loved
ones. My brother, says one. My son, implores another.
Toronto Star, April
21, 2003
------
Anwar Abdul Qadir was there, too, looking. He
has been missing his brother since 1991 as well, when the 17-year-old was taken
from their home at 4 a.m. His
uncle is also missing, and his cousin was executed in 1996. Altogether, he has
six relatives who were arrested and whose whereabouts are unknown. I'm very lucky they just took five or six
relatives, he said, nodding in the direction of Abdul Wahab. Some people had five or six brothers taken.
The Washington Post, April 19, 2003
------
For days now, scores of desperate Iraqis have turned up outside
the state security complex here, searching for their missing loved ones,
begging the American troops who guard its gates to help them find the relatives
whom they believe to be trapped in a prison beneath the sprawling grounds.
With the fall of Saddam Hussein's government, 30 years of buried
history is slowly being resurrected. The Iraqis who appear each morning calling
out names and dates of arrest are hoping that their missing brothers, sisters,
aunts and uncles will be resurrected along with the past.
They hold up one finger, two fingers, four fingers, trying to
explain to the Americans how many relatives are supposedly in the jail. They
throng the gates from dawn to dusk, holding up photos of their vanished loved
ones and holding desperately onto hope.
The New York Times, April 17, 2003
------
One of the disappeared is
the son of an old man named Kadem Agari
Albadri. He lives in a walled-compound on Maarifa Street the street of knowledge landscaped
with fuchsia trees and palms. His name appears in the book as a local teacher.
His son Adnan is there, also: No. 32, arrested March
3, 1991.
Suspect. Whereabouts unknown.
... Much of his family and friends gathered today to hear him
speak. They all brought faded pictures or names scribbled on scrap paper of
sons and brothers who have disappeared. They need look no further than the book.
Before anything, I want to tell the people of America and Britain something, Mr. Albadri
said. There is nothing, nothing more terrible for a father and mother than to
have their child taken from them. Not to know. Never to see his body. You
cannot imagine. This is how we lived.
The New York Times, April 17, 2003
The Children: No Iraqi Too Small
In a pile in one of the
rooms used for torture were textbooks for children: a science book for
third-graders, an agriculture book for sixth-graders. Whole families, including
infants and toddlers, were held in this prison. This was a form of mercy, this
keeping the families together.
The Baltimore Sun, April 20, 2003
------
In another
neighborhood, a group of some 100 children, clothed mostly in rags and newly
released from one of the regime's prisons, hugged and kissed the Marines who
had freed them.
The Washington Post, April 10, 2003
------
Perhaps saddest were two rooms, each hardly bigger
than a normal bedroom, reserved for children; they had been crammed with scores
of kids from 12 to 16 years old, say
the former inmates. Ali Nasr, 13 at the time, was
caught up in a sweep when Shiites throughout Iraq
rioted after the murder of their Grand Ayatollah, Mohammed Sadiq
al-Sader (also called Sader
II) in Najaf.
Ali spent six months in the juvenile
wing of Unit Four, sleeping on his feet when the cell was too crowded to lie
down, or taking turns on the floor with other prisoners. The boy was still too
scared to talk about it, even now.
Newseek on
line, April 8, 2003
------
Former United Nations worker Vanessa
Lough said children as young as four have been taken from their parents during
the night over the past fortnight and murdered after extremists targeted
families thought to have been helping the Coalition forces.
Some children were hanged as their
helpless parents were forced to watch, said Ms Lough, 37. She heard of the
atrocities during a water drop on the outskirts of Basra, Iraq's second largest city and a Ba'ath
party stronghold. In one street alone,
they said three children could at one point be seen hanging from the lampposts
and around the corner another child lay burned on the road. Parents and
children who resisted were badly beaten. Ms Lough said that, at first, the
three women, all middle-aged, were reluctant to talk about what they had seen
for fear of persecution.
They were genuinely afraid for their
lives, she added. Through what I can gather, they knew of at least 11 deaths
but said there were many more elsewhere in the city.
One of the ladies said Ba'ath party leaders
and several henchmen had ordered and carried out the killings after their
headquarters were bombed last week. It was their way of getting back. One of
the men told a father his son was being killed because the father had been seen
laughing with several men from the British Army that day. They told him he had
betrayed Saddam in an act of treason. He received a broken leg and a severe
beating. The men made the father watch
as they set his son alight with petrol.
The Mail on Sunday
(London), April 6, 2003
The Athletes: A High Price for Defeat
After
drawing or losing games, players were punished. A missed penalty or other poor
play entailed a ritual head shaving at the Stadium of the People, or being spat
on by Uday's bodyguards. A series of poor passes, carefully counted,
could result in a player's being forced to stand before the president's son in
the dressing room, hands at his side, while he was punched or slapped in the face
an equal number of times.
But
those were the lesser miseries. Some players endured long periods in a military
prison, beaten on their backs with electric cables until blood flowed. Other
punishments included "matches" kicking concrete balls around the
prison yard in 130-degree heat, and 12-hour sessions of push-ups, sprints and
other fitness drills, wearing heavy military fatigues and boots.
The New York Times, May 6, 2003
The players
would start crying, said Emmanuel Baba, 69, a former player who became a coach
renowned throughout the Arab world, where he is known by his nickname, Ammo
Baba. They would tremble with fear.
When they
got out of prison, they would come to me and lift their shirts to show me the
red stripes on their back. They had been beaten with a metal cable. Then the
guards threw salt water at them, so the scars would stay for life.
The Washington Post, April 24, 2003
-------
Though
the tales of punishment were not a closely guarded secret in Iraq,
it is only now that many athletes are talking freely about their experiences. A
common thread runs through all their narratives. After losing a competition,
players and their retinue were taken to the Olympic Committee building, where
they were harangued before being transferred to a prison, usually Radwaniya. They often had their heads shaved as a mark of
shame and spent the first days in prison without food. Many said they were
whipped on their backs, legs and arms by thick metal cables that hung from a
wall in the prison and were named after snakes. And if they were offered jobs
playing abroad, Uday Hussein demanded a cut of the
contract if they wanted exit visas to leave Iraq.
The Washington Post, April 24, 2003
------
I thought
many times of leaving soccer, said Laith Hussein,
captain of the national team and a star in Iraq. But how could I? I was afraid of what Uday would do to me and my family. I would sit and cry when
I was by myself. I want to play soccer for myself, and for the Iraqi people,
not for Uday.
The Washington Post, April 24, 2003
-------
The friendly between Iraq and Kazakhstan ended in a 2-1
defeat for the home team. The Iraqi footballers had flunked a crucial penalty,
and they dreaded what Uday Saddam Hussein had in
store for them after the final whistle.
Ahmed Sabat,
considered one of the most talented Iraqi soccer players of his generation,
told the story of that fateful day six years ago
. It was a friendly but wed
lost, and we knew what would happen once the spectators left, said the
27-year-old
.
The players and the coach
were made to lie down on the pitch, he explained, and Udays
men came and beat us with sticks on our feet and on our backs and punched us to
punish us.
We suffered in silence. The
psychological pressure on the players was enormous, especially when it came to
penalties.
AFP, April 23, 2003
-------
There was a room painted in
red in the Olympic Committee building where athletes were held in isolation for
days on end, said Sabat, who has a passing
resemblance to the French football star Zinedine Zidane. We were all terrified of this room. Iraqs
state-sponsored sporting violence even extended to journalists who covered
competitions and matches. One reporter, who said he preferred not to give his
name because he was still afraid of Udays men, told
AFP that such violence was widespread in the dark years of Saddams 24-year
rule. I was tortured because Id criticised the governments sport policies,
he said. They took me to one of their special prisons. They blindfolded me and
then tortured me with electricity.
AFP, April 23, 2003
Haydar, who played 12 years on Iraq's junior and senior national teams,
said the troubles started in 1986, when he joined professional team al-Rashid,
which was owned by Hussein. When the team lost, Haydar
said, players were imprisoned for several days.
I was tortured for the first time in
1993, after the Iraqi national team lost 2-0 to Jordan, Haydar told ESPN.com.
A few months
later, when Haydar suggested he might not be able to
play because of a bleeding ulcer, he was arrested at his home at 2:30 a.m. and sent to prison.
He took me right to the Olympic
prison, where the guards whipped my feet 20 times a day for three days, he
said. They gave me nothing to eat or drink other than a daily glass of water
and slice of bread. Then they sent me to al-Radwaniya
for four more days of punishment, and this time, I got the full treatment.
They took my clothes off, laid me down on my back and dragged me by my
legs across hot pavement until my back was a bloody mess. Then they made me
roll in the sand. And just to make sure that the wounds got infected, I had to
climb a 15-foot ladder and jump repeatedly into a pit of sewage water filled
with blood and who knows what else. All
because I wanted to stop playing soccer.
The Miami Herald, April 6, 2003
------
Former Iraqi weightlifter Raed
Ahmad, who defected to the U.S.
during the 1996 Games in Atlanta,
told the Daily News that athletes are
routinely deprived of food and sleep, and the soles of their feet are caned.
They are chained to walls for days, he said, and sometimes thrown into tanks
filled with raw sewage.
The Daily News (New York), April 2, 2003
Pervasive Fear
The writers who praised Saddam would get treated
well. The members of the Baath party were always watching the others. There
were always security members at my plays and sometimes they (the plays) were
not allowed, said [Aziz Abdul] Sahib.
Sahib said he had been selling his writings at a public market once a
week just so I could eat.
AFP, April 28, 2003
------
Poet Imad Kadhum
said he had been terrified that Baath
members would inform on him and that several friends were arrested for
offending Saddam, who was himself credited with penning several
self-aggrandizing novels.
All the writers here refused Saddam Hussein and many
were in trouble if we did not praise Saddam in our poetry or stories, he
said. We never accepted that we were
criminals. If our work was disliked by Saddam or (eldest son) Uday, then we
would be placed in jail.
A lot of (writers) may have been killed, and to this
day we don't know what has happened to them, Kadhum said.
AFP, April 28, 2003
------
A slightly broader picture of what happened has
emerged from the chief gravedigger, just 21 years old. He is Muhammad Muslim
Muhammad and he said he began digging graves here when he was 14 to fulfill his
military service.
He said he received the bodies every Wednesday at
about 11 a.m., after the weekly hangings at around 5 a.m. There were never fewer than nine bodies to bury.
During one especially bad time in 2001, he said, the numbers rose. One day he
buried 18 people. He said he had never told anyone the details of his job. I didn't open my mouth, or I would have
ended up with these poor people here, he said.
Report
on Al Qarah Cemetery
The New York Times, April 25, 2003
------
The Iraqi Intelligence Service established a
unit to assassinate Saddam Hussein's enemies at home and abroad that claimed 66
successful operations between 1998 and 2000, according to documents obtained
by The Times.
Found on the floor of a looted Intelligence
Service villa on the east bank of the Tigris River here, the six-page file
described the program and contained suggestions for improving its effectiveness
including obtaining poisonous gas disguised as perfume or explosives that
would detonate when the car of the target passed by.
Los Angeles Times, April 25, 2003
------
Saboowalla said
he was imprisoned because he spoke his mind to fellow travelers fleeing Baghdad after Saddam's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. He said he'd
remarked that if talks with the United Nations did not work, force would be
used against Saddam.
"
someone overheard me. The police came the same
day and asked why I spoke against Saddam," said Saboowalla. I told them it
was just normal conversation and I didn't mean it.
An Iraqi court sentenced him to 20 years for
insulting Saddam, who was then Iraq's president. He said the police testified that he had
advocated shooting and killing Saddam. The years in jail have made him watch
his words. He refused to talk about how he was treated in jail.
But his younger brother
said Saboowalla had spoken of
being placed in solitary confinement for weeks and not seeing the sun for 27
months.
Report on the return to India of Annis
Mohammed Saboowalla, who had been imprisoned in Iraq since 1991
Associated Press, April 25, 2003
------
I went to kill one person, but suddenly I saw he had guards with
him, so I killed four or five of his guards, Ali recalled. After that, we cut
off his head and we put it in a bag and we brought it to Baghdad from Karbala at 4 a.m. We put it in front of Udays office. He
asked us to bring his head.
The Washington Post, April 22, 2003
-------
As I began to cut Udays hair, this man (Udays press secretary) was
praying as they (Udays bodyguards) extracted his teeth with pliers. But my
hands didnt shake. I was always very careful. I knew a small mistake would be
the end of me.
Marwan Ali, Uday Husseins
barber
Daily Mail, April 22, 2003
------
Ali belonged to Saddam's Fedayeen, a security force led by
Hussein's elder son, Uday. For the better part of a decade, he recalled, he
assassinated opposition figures, broke the backs of those accused of lying to
the government and chopped off tongues, fingers, hands and once even a head.
It didn't matter if we felt he was guilty or not guilty. We had
to do it, he explained. These people were against Saddam Hussein. If we got
orders to punish him, we would go and do it. If Uday said to cut off his
tongue, we would do it. Or his hands or fingers or his head. Anything. We would
do it.
I just followed orders, he said.
The Washington Post, April 22, 2003
------
Iraq became one of the few nations that
legally sanctioned the use of torture in pre-trial investigations, and as a
punitive measure. The death sentence was prescribed for a large variety of
offenses including usurpation of public money, corruption, insulting the
presidency, and treason -- loosely defined. Law became whimsical and contingent
on the will of the party and president. Even foreign investments were dependent
on the good will of the ruling elite, often tapping into a network of
businessmen sanctioned and protected by a Saddam family clique.
Khaled
Abou El Fadl, op-ed
Wall Street Journal, April 21, 2003
------
I
am one of millions who have been tortured, said 33-year-old Ali Khadem Al
Essery, whose knuckles were smashed with a club while he was being interrogated
in 1994. Everyone here knows someone who was tortured, and many victims see a
bleak future without a measure of justice exacted on the torturers.
Newsday, April 21, 2003
------
The picture that emerged of the intelligence service here was of a
kind of sadistic shakedown operation, where agents took prisoners to satisfy
their masters but extracted money to satisfy themselves.
Other men returning here
said the interrogators had gone even further, demanding sex with female
relatives when no money could be paid. In most cases, the prisoners said,
bribes were paid, women were offered, but the prisoner remained in jail.
My family paid them
everything we had, $25,000, and still they did not release me, Mr. Masawi
said.
The New York Times, April 21, 2003
------
Tens of thousands of security files on Iraqis have been found in a huge
underground vault beneath the headquarters of Saddam Hussein's most feared
secret police agency, the legacy of a Soviet-style domestic spying system that
controlled everything from job assignments to whether a person would live or die.
The files include the mundane -- a man denied the right to leave the
country because he refused a job transfer -- and the chilling -- a 19-year-old
high school student hanged because he admitted he was the leader of a cell of a
banned political party.
By God, this is everyone in Iraq,
translator George Yousef muttered as he entered the records vault, about twice
the size of a basketball court, discovered two days ago by U.S. marines and
visited by a journalist Sunday.
Knight-Ridder
Newspapers, April 21, 2003
------
Maithan
Al Naji had a visit from a United Nations relief team. Anwar Abdul Al Razaq got
sick. Zuhair H. Jawa Kubba had American
dollars in his pocket. Jawad Abdul Al
Naby smuggled some sheep. Because these
things happened, these men were beaten with steel rods, had electrodes placed
on their genitals, were hung from their arms until their shoulders were
dislocated, were suspended by their ankles over the stone floor of a cell while
their torturers whipped them with electric cables and pulverized their knuckles
with wooden clubs.
Newsday, April
21, 2003
------
I am still afraid, he murmured. Saddam is alive and so are all those
closest to him. We don't know if one day the regime will come back. Those who
did this to me are still around, We just don't know their faces. They just took off their uniforms and went
home. They are still out there and we are still afraid.
Mutilation victim interviewed
The Sunday Times (London), April 20, 2003
------
Former prisoners of ousted
president Saddam Hussein's government are everywhere in Basra, standing on street corners waiting for
water, rummaging through papers in the headquarters of the once feared secret
police, sitting quietly at home on a hot afternoon. These are the tortures they
describe, and more: a prisoner forced to sit on a heated metal stove, electric
shocks applied to genitals, a small blade used to slash a prisoner's back. Even
doctors became torturers; they cut off army deserters' ears. Servants of the
system fell victim to it, too: police officers and prison guards arrested,
tortured, then sent back to work.
Torture was considered so routine that many former prisoners shrugged at
first when asked about it. Of course, they tortured me. Beating people here is
something regular, said Maithem Naji.
The Washington Post, April 19, 2003
------
I was sitting outside my fathers house in a village near Tikrit on
Friday when two carloads of fedayeen stopped. They got out and began to beat me
and accuse me of being a saboteur. Then they shot me in the leg. They took me
to the police station and kept me for three nights, saying they would kill me.
Then yesterday they just disappeared. And at 7am this morning
(Monday) an American Marine came and let me out of my cell. I feel very lucky.
Khalid Jauhr, an Iraqi Kurd
Daily Mail, April 15, 2003
------
The few Iraqi men of
Pumping Station No. 1 tried to protect it as if it were their own. In the end,
they lost tools, spare parts and important records to gangs ransacking the oil
complex. But they saved the new red fire engine; a quick-thinking operations
manager drove it home.
Over the weekend, the
men sat silently, their faces clouded with doubt and fear, as an American oil
engineer tried to convince them the station - and the oil flowing through it -
really do belong to them and the Iraqi people.
Under Saddam's regime,
the workers said, the station was a place where they had to be careful in their
work and careful what they said. On the payroll as a mechanic was a Baath Party
official whose real job was to ensure loyalty to the Iraqi dictator.
Any workers who
complained would disappear in the night, said Muslim Yehia, a technician. We
don't know if they were killed or tortured or ran away.
USA Today, April 14, 2003
------
U.S. soldiers with
tanks and armoured vehicles took over the sprawling compound of Baghdad's military
intelligence headquarters on Friday after local people thronged the compound
searching for missing relatives.
Reuters correspondent Khaled Yacoub
Oweis said he heard one explosion. It was not clear what caused it. Earlier,
Iraqi civilians had been digging feverishly, saying they believed relatives
were trapped in underground dungeons used by Saddam Hussein's feared security
apparatus.
Reuters, April 11, 2003
------
The Baath Party completely
dominated life in Iraq. Until this week, every neighbourhood had a Baath official who kept
tabs on the area, ran a network of informants and recruited members into the
party, say Iraqis. It wasn't difficult to figure out who they were: They had
the best cars and the nicest houses and they had money to throw around.
It didn't take much to run afoul
of the party. A wrong word or chance comment within earshot of an informant
often was enough to earn an interrogation or worse, according to residents of
southern Iraq. There was little accountability, charges were difficult to counter
and informants were eager to turn in troublemakers to prove their own value.
Ordinary people living in this
kind of pressure cooker, where any misstep could be fatal, generally avoided
sharing their true feelings with anyone but their closest friends and
relatives. Making sure children didn't say an errant word before they
understood the implications was also an essential survival tactic. You only talked when you were sitting with
your very, very closest friends, said Raheem Khagany, 24, an assistant
engineering professor. If a Baath member heard you, you could be executed.
Los Angeles Times, April 11, 2003
------
I am from the city of Kirkuk and for the last ten
years I have been unable to return to my home there because of Saddam. Seven of
my relatives were executed there by his security police when this war started.
But God willing and with the help of Britain and
the United States I can go back home now and live in peace.
Prshing
Mohamed, Iraqi Kurd in Northern Iraq
Daily Mail, April 10, 2003
------
One middle-aged man
held up a huge portrait of Saddam and used his shoe to beat the face of the
Iraqi leader, a particular insult. This
man has killed 2 million of us, he yelled as bystanders milled around
approvingly.
The looters roamed
unhindered through police stations, government ministries and other buildings.
A favorite spot was the Al-Sinaa sports complex that held thousands of new
athletic shoes and was alleged to be the site of an Iraqi torture chamber.
Orlando Sentinel, April 10, 2003
------
A burly 39-year-old man named Qifa, assigned by Mr. Hussein's
Information Ministry to keep watch on an American reporter, paused at
midmorning, outside the inferno that had been the headquarters of Iraq's National Olympic Committee, to ask the
reporter to grip his hand. The building, used to torture and kill opponents of
Mr. Hussein, had been one of the most widely feared places in Iraq.
Touch me, touch me,
tell me that this is real, tell me that the nightmare is really over, the man
said, tears running down his face.
New
York Times, April 4, 2003
------
Ahmed [writer Ahmed
Shawkut] went to prison again in 1997. This time, it was his second collection
of short stories that did him in. The government had approved the book, but
Ahmed sneaked into one of the stories a poorly veiled allegory criticizing
Hussein. San Francisco Chronicle, April 2,
2003
Unspeakable Acts: Mass Murder
The scene today was a swirl of weeping
women in billowing black robes and men digging, all careful to avoid trampling
piles of bones in two neat rows in a pit that grew throughout the day.
A tiny green dress rested on bones the
size of twigs, set on a brown cloth. Next to it sat a larger pile that belonged
to the child's mother. An infant's bones rested on the next cloth, stained a
deep chocolate brown. Other victims were older. An intact set of false teeth
sat atop one pile, gathering dust in the warm breeze.
Many of the skulls had been sawed open.
Small clumps of hair and faded plastic identification bracelets sat inside each
one. A series of mounds beyond the first graves may hold more victims.
The Washington Post, May 5, 2003
-------
About 25 bodies were dug
up on Saturday and 10 identified. About 20 more sets of remains were uncovered
yesterday. It was unclear how many bodies were buried at the site, but several
mounds were visible on the flat farmland - hills that US Marines in the area
said could mark additional graves. Some
bodies had identification cards in their pockets. 'I'm looking for my own
relatives, said Jawad Shaker, who arrived at the
site on Sunday. Another person said he was looking for his nephew who
disappeared in 1991.
Birmingham Post, May 5, 2003
-------
One
farmer, who refused to give his name, said he saw people blindfolded and shot
in the back of the head after the uprising.
Everybody knew and could see, but they kept quiet, said Kamel al-Tamini, another farmer
living in the area. We were told to
stay away from this area, not to go near it, that it was a security zone.
Birmingham Post, May 5, 2003
-------
Scores of Iraqi families went to Babylon yesterday to examine 35 neat piles of
skulls and bones and shreds of shirts and blankets at one of the biggest mass
graves uncovered in Iraq.
They were the remains of 20 men, 10 women and five children. Some
claimed to be able to identify a lost brother, son or uncle, but in reality
identification was impossible. Only a small area has been dug up so far and the
families believe there may be more than
1,000 bodies. Saddam Hussein's army and party took their revenge on the town of
Hilla and the surrounding area, which includes
the archaeological site of Babylon, for the Shia rising
after the 1991 Gulf war.
The Guardian (London),
May 5, 2003
In May 1991, having served in the Persian Gulf War with the
Marines, I volunteered for further duty in Provide Comfort -- a joint military
operation designed to assist in the relocation of Kurdish refugees into
northern Iraq. Assigned to the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, I was flown to
the city of Zakho, where the unit was establishing its headquarters in and around
an abandoned Iraqi divisional headquarters building
.
As the Marines began digging defensive positions and putting up
tents, a grisly discovery was made. Heavy equipment had unearthed myriad body
parts; hands, arms, legs, etc., were uncovered in what was determined to have
been a mass grave. Most telling among this evidence of inhumanity was an
infant's sandal.
The body parts were reburied immediately after their discovery,
but for many days the stench of rotting flesh lingered in the air until all the
remains were located and reburied. It was later learned from the Kurds that
about 70 of their tribesmen had been taken into this Iraqi divisional HQ and
that none had come out alive. The victims were brutally tortured and executed,
their remains then thrown into a common grave.
James
Zumwalt, op-ed
The Washington Post, April 30, 2003
------
Kubba's money insulated his family from mayhem, but it did not
shield him from witnessing the almost casual slaughter of his people. Last week
he recalled a scene that haunts me still. Kubba was driving his Mercedes
through Basra's Saad Square when he came upon some 600 men who had
been detained while police checked their IDs. According to Kubba, Chemical
Ali Hassan al-Majid, Saddam's half brother and the tyrant of southern Iraq, stopped and inquired, No IDs? Just
shoot them all. Kubba watched as they shot over 600 people in front of me.
Newsweek, April 28, 2003
------
In 2000, Mr. Abu Sakkar
[a clandestine government agent] was caught under-reporting activities in the
mosques and sent for two months to Tourist
Island
on the Tigris
river, south of Baghdad,
to receive a crude brand of re-education.
Three of my fellow
Shias were shot in front of me, he said. When he returned to his work with the
police campaign to put down Shia opponents and rebels, he witnessed more
savagery. One day I walked into the
station and the room of the interrogation office was wide open. I saw Captain
Abbass, one of our men, beating a man on the floor. I recognised him as a Shia
religious student. He beat the man in
the head and I noticed and pointed out to the captain that the student was
already dead. He just said that he wanted to punish him more and that his hand
was the hand of god.
The Daily Telegraph, April
23, 2003
------
Near Kirkuk, U.S. military forces discovered about 1,500
unmarked graves last week near a military base and industrial park. Officials
believe they are the remains of victims of Saddam's repression of ethnic
minorities, including Iraqi Kurds. Tens of thousands of Kurdish men disappeared
under Saddam and were killed, according to human rights groups.
Beth Ann
Toupin, an Iraq specialist with Amnesty International,
said it is still early to know the magnitude of rights abuses under Saddam.
There's probably much more to be found, she said, noting that hidden prisons
may be discovered. And what's new to us is that now people care.
The Washington Times, April 23, 2003
------
This is my brother, declared Munther Taffuk
after examining the freshly exhumed corpse, relieved to a point that he had
found his missing sibling after a two-year search. Munther then moved in for a
closer look.
My God, he screamed. They took out his
eyes. He then pulled two matted pieces
of cotton wool from the eye sockets of his little brothers skull and wept.
His sister, Manal, cried openly as she said
her younger brother, Muthfer, simply vanished without trace two years ago. My
God, look what they did. This is my brother, he did nothing wrong.
Times
of Oman, April 22, 2003
------
I have spoken to a prison officer who worked there. He had no idea how
many people were killed in that prison but he said it must have been thousands.
In one corner of that prison outside the walls of an inner secure area
we found relatives grieving over an open grave where they had found a number of
bodies. Bodies who have had their hands tied behind their backs - they had been
shot in the head.
It is our understanding that these people had been rounded up for the
simple crime of having a satellite mobile telephone. As such they were
suspected of being American spies. They
were shot in the dying days of the regime even though those who shot them must
have known that the end was up.
Tim Rogers, reporting from Baghdad on bodies found in
a prison run by the Iraqi Ministry of Social Affairs
------
The Baath regime has gone and now we can talk
freely with you. They (corpses) are all political. Ten to 15 bodies would
arrive at a time from the Abu Ghraib prison and we would bury them here. The
last corpse interred was number 993.
Mohymeed Aswad, manager of Baghdad
cemetery
AFP, April 21, 2003
------
The civilians were hanged. Sometimes a soldier would come through and
they were all shot. I could distinguish them by their uniforms. This grave
belongs to a woman. She was hanged. There are another five cemeteries in Baghdad with secret gravesites so in this city alone
there are about 6,000 (political) corpses.
Mohammad Moshan Mohammad, gravedigger at a Baghdad
cemetery
AFP, April 21, 2003
------
I saw thousands killed and
buried in mass graves. Some were lined up and machine- gunned before being
covered with sand. Others were just buried alive. Saddam had a programme of telling villagers
(Kurds) they were being relocated south. We would take trucks that would
normally hold 12 to 15 people and put in 200 with no water or ventilation. Many
would die on the way. Survivors were driven to Al Anbar or Tharthar and buried
alive in vast holes dug in the ground. I saw thousands of people men, women
and children die this way.
Defecting
colonel in Iraqi internal security service
Evening Standard, April 17, 2003
------
At least three massacres on Saddam City's streets have occurred in
the last 10 years, including 700 people gunned down during a 1998 Shiite
demonstration, said Muhammad Qadim Saadoun, a former air force helicopter pilot
whose 40-day political imprisonment ended last week with the U.S. entry into
Baghdad.
He said he was imprisoned repeatedly for refusing to fire on his
fellow Shiites, who form the majority of the population but had long been
subservient to Mr. Hussein's Sunni-dominated secular government.
You cannot imagine the horrible things they did to us, Mr.
Saadoun said. He was tortured while hanging upside down by his feet and
pistol-whipped so hard he has lost some of his memory.
The Dallas Morning News, April 17, 2003
------
When they came closer,
I could see in the bus men, women and children with blindfolds over their eyes.
I was very afraid and hid in a hole. It was mostly men. There were about eight
children and ten women. They (Baath Party forces) took them off the bus and
led them over to the hole in groups. They sat or knelt and then they began to
shoot them from very close, many shots.
Some were just pushed in and then covered up with earth. There was no
escape, it was done very quickly.
I could not tell this
secret because I knew it was dangerous knowledge that I should not hold,
dangerous knowledge. But if the British Army want me to show them I will dig up
the bodies myself, because I know they are there. I can never forget.
Satar
Al Khalid, a Bedouin, recalls an
incident he saw near Ramallah, Iraq, in 1998
Daily Mail, April
14, 2003
------
Prisoners were taken to watch executions;
anyone who cried was executed, too. Our
hands were tied like this. First the
left hand and then the foot. Then a
black hood on my head, then they applied electricity.
They had a game: They made people drink
gasoline, then put them out in open ground and fire guns at them.
Abdallah Ahmed, survivor of Abu
GhraibPrison
CBS
Evening News,
April 14, 2003
------
Two men yesterday gave eyewitness
accounts of the execution last Saturday of a commander of the Iraqi 29th
brigade after he recommended retreating from Sheykhan, a frontline town that
fell to US and Kurdish forces at the weekend.
He was made to stand in a ditch for
half an hour or so and then he was shot, said Salah Mehdi Taleb. The man who
shot him was Mahmoud Taher, who also gave us political education.
The Financial
Times (London), April 10, 2003
Unspeakable Acts: Torture
Turkish officials were told
how Turkomans and Kurds were tortured together by Saddam Hussein's Iraqi police
at the notorious security headquarters of Kirkuk. I was taken
into custody and forced to sit on my knees for six days in a cell one meter by
one meter along with a Kurdish prisoner, a Turkoman man told the group. The
man, who asked not to be named, said, Even this shows how we and the Kurds suffered
the same fate in this city.
Turkish
Daily News, April 29, 2003
------
As
part of the prison routine, Issa was tortured daily, sometimes twice a day. Battery acid was spilled on his feet, which are
now deformed. With his hands bound behind his back, he was hanged by his wrists
from the ceiling until his shoulders dislocated; he still cannot lift his hands
above his head. The interrogators goal: They just wanted me to say I was
plotting against the Baath Party, so they could take me and execute me. If they
got a confession, they would get 100,000 dinars [roughly $40].
Newsweek, April 28, 2003
------
In the night,
they took me again to the room, and they made my body wet with water. I was
naked, he recalls, and now is when he searches with his eyes for that spot. To
cushion his words: They used clamps to connect electrical wire to his genitals
and then they sent a current running through him.
My whole body shook,
he says. I was shouting to them, I will sign anything! Just stop this! I was
shaking, shaking. I shook until I passed out.
The guards shocked him
in the same way every night for two weeks. When they feared he would die, they
gave him a week off. Then back to the shocking. Always they beat him, sometimes
on his back, sometimes on his legs and arms, often on the soles of his feet
until they bled. The pattern continued
for six months.
The Baltimore Sun, April 20, 2003
------
Another former prisoner from Saddam City, Hussein Ali, said he was arrested for
participating in the 1998 protest and imprisoned until late last year. During
torture sessions, his fingernails were yanked off his fingers. He described his
cell as a big hole with lots of insects and worms.
The Dallas Morning News, April 17, 2003
------
Me. Me. Me, they murmured in
response to the question: Whose father, brother, son had been executed by
Saddam Husseins government? Eleven hands in all, raised in the stagnant air
inside the low mud-brick house of Sheik Kathem Al Wafi, signalling the death
toll here.
These men and their sheik, the
elders of the Al Wafi tribe, are people of the Madan, the marsh Arabs who for
five millennia lived in a vast area of wetlands that began about 50 miles north
of Basra
lived, that is, until 1988, when Husseins government began a systematic
campaign of oppression, execution and internal exile against them.
Newsday, April 14, 2003
------
I was beaten, refrigerated
naked and put underground for one year because I was a Shiite and Saddam is a
Sunni, said Ali Kaddam Kardom, 37. He said he was arrested in the central city
of Karbala on March 10, 2000. He returned to the
facility in Baghdad this weekend, he
said, to help rescue any Iraqis who still might be imprisoned there.
USA Today, April 14, 2003
------
An Iraqi soldier, who
according to the facilitys records witnessed the beatings, said interrogators
regularly used pliers to remove mens teeth, electric prods to shock mens
genitals and drills to cut holes in their ankles.
In one instance, the soldier
recalled, he witnessed a Kuwaiti soldier, who had been captured during the 1991
Persian Gulf War, being forced to sit on a broken Pepsi bottle. The man was
removed from the bottle only after it filled up with his blood, the soldier
said. He said the man later died.
I have seen interrogators
break the heads of men with baseball bats, pour salt into wounds and rape wives
in front of their husbands, said former Iraqi soldier Ali Iyad Kareen, 41.
He then revealed dozens of
Polaroid pictures of beaten and dead Iraqis from the directorates files.
USA Today, April 14, 2003
------
Saturday, former prisoners
and Iraqi soldiers said they heard screams of help from men who were still
there. Several soldiers who tried to enter the underground prison through a
manhole said they found the area flooded and doors locked. Kanan Alwan, 41, who
worked in the facilitys administrative office, said the intelligence officers
of the facility programmed the prisons computers, which control the water
flow, so that the water level would exceed the height of the prison doors.
They are drowning in there,
and theres nothing we can do for them, Alwan said. The real criminals fled.
But the innocents who probably did nothing wrong have been condemned to death.
USA Today, April 14, 2003
------
They took my brother in 1998, said Sabah Al Wafi, 24, a
relative of the sheik, and they executed him. I was arrested later. I had a
letter from a Kuwaiti prisoner of war one of 605 Kuwaitis still recorded as
missing from the 1991 Gulf War and they
found it when they searched my house. They tortured me with electricity. They
made me sit on hot metal plates. They used to drink and laugh as they tortured
me.
Newsday, April 14, 2003
------
The ordeal of
one
victim of the secret police, a woman identified only as Laila, is recounted
in A Book of Cruelty An Attempt to
Spoil What Has Remained of Your Lives, by Amer Badr Hassoun. According to
Hassouns account, the woman, a young law professor, was taken into custody for
refusing to join the Baath Party. She was transferred from a Baghdad prison to a
series of prisons in the north before ending up at the Baghdad security
directorate. One of her torturers there was a former student who kicked her and
administered electric shocks before killing a 13-year-old boy who was also a
prisoner.
During one torture session, she passed out
and was taken to the adjoining Security Hospital and subsequently to the nearby al-Kindi Hospital. She was threatened with execution if she spoke of her torture to
doctors or nurses. When a doctor asked her if she had been tortured, she
responded with silence.
She was later
tried by a judge named Awwad al-Bandar on the charge of not joining the Baath
Party. After being refused permission to represent herself, she was convicted
and given a life sentence. She was ultimately released during one of Husseins
amnesty declarations and later told her story to Hassoun. Her current
whereabouts are unclear.
Knight-Ridder Newspapers, April
14, 2003
------
The male warders made her wear
pants, an offense to Shiites strict female dress codes; without a belt they
often fell down. The low point of every day was the daily torture session; the high point, gruel in a
bowl, the prisoners only meal. Even that was denied her if I made some mistake.
Hashmias jailors scored her back with a hot poker, beat the soles of her feet
with sticks, made her pull up her baggy pants and whipped her legs. The sexual
humiliation may have been even worse than the pain, but that was serious. They
slapped me so hard that my neck hurts from it even now. The torturers wanted
her to confess to plotting against the Baathist regime, but she knew that would
mean a death sentence.
Newsweek on
line, April 12, 2003
------
Naji Abbas headed out for a couple of
hours one day in 1985 to buy some medicine and never returned. Thirteen months
later, family members say, the police told them they could pick up his body at
the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. Abbas, who, according to
relatives, was guilty of nothing more than being a Shiite Muslim in Sunni-ruled
Iraq, had been tortured, an eye poked out, an arm broken and his chest
burned with electrical wires. The regime of Saddam Hussein then delivered the
clincher: Family members were asked to pay 30 dinars, a month's wages, for the
bullets that killed him.
Los Angeles Times, April 11, 2003
------
in the mid-1990's one of our Iraqi
cameramen was abducted. For weeks he was beaten and subjected to electroshock
torture in the basement of a secret police headquarters because he refused to
confirm the government's ludicrous suspicion that I was the Central
Intelligence Agency's Iraq station chief. CNN had been in Baghdad long enough to know that telling the world about the torture of
one of its employees would almost certainly have gotten him killed and put his
family and co-workers at grave risk.
Eason Jordan, CNN chief news executive
The New York
Times, April 11, 2003
------
For five years Hashim, a teacher of
English at a local secondary school, was held in an Iraqi prison and tortured.
His scarred arms bore witness to how, he said, he was strung from the ceiling
and beaten by members of the Iraqi secret services.
I had refused to join the party.
They hit me a great deal and I was made to eat my meals like a dog with my
hands tied behind my back. But I knew I could never join the Baath Party. How
could I and keep my conscience clean? he said.
If you want to stay out of trouble
you have to join, and then you could be promoted in the party from the street
level to representing the city. But then take part in beatings and the burning
of property of the people they don't like. I was one of the people they didn't
like.
The Irish Times, April 8, 2003
Unspeakable Acts: Mutilation
Anwar Abdul Razak, remembers when a surgeon kissed him on each
cheek, said he was sorry and cut his ears off. Razak, then 21 years old, had
been swept up during one of Saddam Hussein's periodic crackdowns on deserters
from the Army. Razak says he was innocently on leave at the time, but no
matter; he had been seized by some Baath Party members who earned bounties for
catching Army deserters. At Basra Hospital, Razak's ears were sliced off without
painkillers. He said he was thrown into jail with 750 men, all with bloody
stumps where their ears had been. They called us Abu [Arabic for father]
Earless, recalls Razak, whose fiancee left him because of his disfigurement.
No one is sure how many men were mutilated during that particular
spasm of terror, but from May 17 to 19, 1994, all the available surgeons worked shifts
at all of Basra's major hospitals, lopping off ears. (One
doctor who refused was shot.) Today, Dr. Jinan al-Sabagh, an administrator at
Basra Teaching Hospital, insists that the victims numbered only 70 or 80, but
he'd prefer not to talk about it. He says the ear-chopping stopped before his
own surgery rotation came up. I want to forget about all this. I vowed I would
never do it. I said I am a surgeon, not a butcher
.
Newsweek, April 28, 2003
-----
Doctors gave
him an injection and he lost consciousness, he said. When he awoke, the right
side of his head was wrapped in bandages. It was Sept. 15,
1994.
I started
crying, Mr. Ghanem said. I felt crippled. I felt oppressed. I hated Saddam
with all of my heart, but I didn't know what to do.
He was sent
to prison where he said he saw hundreds of others missing one ear. Many, like
Mr. Ghanem, had inflamed wounds.
His mother
came every Friday, selling off household appliances to buy painkillers and
antibiotics for her son. Others were less fortunate. Mr. Ghanem described a
medieval scene in which delirious and dying inmates lay on the prison's dirt
floor screaming from pain. The right side of some of the men's heads were
puffed up like red balloons, he said. Two of his friends died from infections.
Saddam, God curse him, treated my son like an
animal, said Mr. Ghanem's weeping mother. Only animals have their ears cut
off.
The
New York Times, April 24, 2003
------
Thousands of people are
missing in Iraq, victims of Saddam Husseins
dictatorship, but a more visible legacy are the parts that are missing from
people who survived. Missing eyes, ears, toenails and tongues mark those who
fell into the hands of Mr. Husseins powerful security services.
The
New York Times, April 24, 2003
------
Farris
Salman is one of the last victims of Mr. Husseins rule. His speech is slurred
because he is missing part of his tongue.
Black-hooded paramilitary troops, the Fedayeen Saddam, run by Mr. Husseins
eldest son, Uday, pulled it out of his mouth with pliers last month, he said,
and sliced it off with a box cutter. They made his family and dozens of his
neighbors watch.
...Salman
was blindfolded and bundled into a van. Residents of his neighborhood say the
van arrived in the afternoon with an escort of seven trucks carrying more than
a hundred black-uniformed fedayeen wearing black masks that only showed their
eyes. They rounded up neighbors for what was billed as a rally; Mr. Salmans
mother was ordered to bring a picture of Mr. Hussein. Two men held Mr. Salmans
arms and head steady, and pointed a gun to his temple. Another man with a video
camera recorded the scene. I was standing and they told me to stick my tongue
out or they would shoot me, and so I did. It was too quick to be painful but
there was a lot of blood. The fedayeen stuffed his mouth with cotton and took
him to a local hospital, where he got five stitches, no painkiller and was
returned to prison.
The
New York Times, April 24, 2003
------
Kadhim
Sabbit al-Datajji, 61, a resident of the poor Shiite neighborhood known as Saddam City under Mr. Hussein, said his trouble began
when the eldest of his seven sons became old enough to join the Baath Party,
but did not. Some Baathists in the neighborhood began asking why no one in my
family was a party member and saying that with so many children, my family
could cause trouble, he said. They asked, Why don't you or your sons join?
We think you are in an opposition party.
He now has a
walleyed stare to show for eight years in prison. He is quick to pop out his
glass eye for a visitor - and to tell of how he lost the real one to torture.
The
New York Times, April 24, 2003
------
Dr.
Jinan Al Sabagh, a surgeon at Basra's Teaching Hospital, remembers the day in 1994
when the Baath Party came to the hospital with groups of men who were said to
be deserters. The doctors were told to slice off the men's ears.
It was definitely obligatory, said Al
Sabagh, a gentle man in his 60s who seemed close to tears as he struggled to
describe what happened those three days. If you didn't, you would have the
same thing done to you.
They made four groups of doctors, one for
each day, Al Sabagh explained. I was in the fourth group. One doctor here
refused and they said if you didn't do it we will do the same to you. He did
it.
Newsday, April 21, 2003
------
He described how, clad in black garb that
covered all but his eyes, he had often meted out sentences in the street, in
front of a victim's family and horrified onlookers. Guarded by armed
colleagues, he used to tie up and blindfold the accused. One of his men held
the detainee's head in a firm grip. Another forced open the mouth.
Ali would then draw out a pair of pliers and a sharp knife. Gripping the
tongue with pliers, he would slice it up with the knife, tossing severed pieces
into the street.
Those punished
were too terrified to move, even though they knew I was about to chop off their
tongue, said Ali in his matter-of-fact voice. They would just stand there,
often praying and calling out for Saddam and Allah to spare them. By then it
was too late.
I would read them out the
verdict and cut off their tongue without any form of anaesthetic. There was
always a lot of blood. Some offenders passed out. Others screamed in pain. They
would then be given basic medical assistance in an ambulance which would always
come with us on such punishment runs. Then they would be thrown in jail.
Fedayeen Saddam member
interviewed
The
Sunday Times (London), April 20, 2003
------
Ferass Adnan is a
23-year-old trader who speaks with difficulty these days now that part of his
tongue is missing. Some months ago he got into a fight in a market in northern Baghdad and was
overheard insulting Saddam as the son of a dog. A policeman tried to arrest
him, but Adnan fled.
Within hours, Iraqi secret police agents arrived at Adnan's home and,
failing to find him, took away his uncle, brother, and two cousins. They were
thrown in jail and tortured with electric shocks.
It was only a matter of days before the regime's ubiquitous security
spies caught up with Adnan in the suburbs of Baghdad. He was jailed and then, on March 5, turned
over to the specialists of Ali's punishment squad.
Adnan was taken back to his father's home in north Baghdad, where his entire family was ordered to
gather outside the local coffee house.
His hands were tied and his
eyes blindfolded, the young man's father, Adnan Duleimi, recalled last week.
I had not seen my son since they had arrested him. I tried to pay for his
release. I lost all my savings, handing everything I had to corrupt security
officers who promised to help but only took my money. There was nothing I could
do. I had to watch in silence as they
took a knife to my son's tongue. Had I said a word we would all have been
killed.
The
Sunday Times (London), April 20, 2003
------
There was no mild form of criticism when it came to Saddam, Uday or the
regime, said Ali. Any critical comment, even to say that the president looked
tired in a speech, was enough to risk having ones tongue cut off by us.
Interview with a member of the Fedayeen
Saddam
The Sunday Times (London), April 20, 2003
Unimaginable Places
This
building was equipped with torture contraptions that included a sarcophagus,
with long nails pointing inward from every surface, including the lid, so
victims could be punctured and suffocated.
Another device, witnesses said, was a metal framework designed to clamp
over a prisoner's body, with footrests at the bottom, rings at the shoulders
and attachment points for power cables, so the victim could be hoisted and
subjected to electric shocks.
The New York Times, May 6, 2003
-------
It
appeared that at least some of the patients [in Iraqs only psychiatric hospital]
were political dissidents. Mohammed Abdul Sattar, an
assistant manager at the hospital, said that about 50 of the 650 male patients
before the war had been sent by the courts because some of them had attacked
the government, and so the judges have them brought here to evaluate whether
they are a mental patient.
I
am here because of Saddam, said Karim Cobra, who
described himself as a poet. I'm not from the Baath
Party. I had some ideas of my own.
Los Angeles Times, May 1, 2003
-------
A nondescript five-story building notable only by the extra barbed
wire on the roof, the Haakimiya Prison is actually 10 stories. Belowground are
interrogation cells where unspeakable horrors were committed.
A former inmate,
Mohsen Mutar Ulga, 34,
was searching for documents about his cousin, executed
under Saddam. Ulga said he was sentenced to 12 years in jail for belonging to
an armed religious group called the revenge movement for Sadr, referring to a
martyred Shiite cleric. He had been arrested with 19 others; the lucky ones
were executed right away. The rest were tortured with electric cattle prods and
forced to watch the prison guards gang-rape their wives and sisters. Some were
fed into a machine that looked like a giant meat cutter. People's bodies were
cut into tiny pieces and thrown into the Tigris River, said Ulga.
Ulga and the reporter silently walked through the darkened cells
at Haakimiya, which was surprisingly clean, except for the graffiti on the
walls. GOD I ASK YOUR MERCY, scratched one prisoner who'd marked 42 days on the
walls. SAVE ME, MARY, implored another, presumably a Christian. IN MEMORY OF
LUAY AND ABBAS WHO WERE TORTURED, read another.
Newsweek, April 28, 2003
------
Radi Ismael Mekhedi spent 10 years behind bars. Last week, he
wandered through the looted prison and stood behind the red bars of his former
cell for the first time in over 10 years. I was severely tortured during my
imprisonment because I was considered a traitor to my country. I never believed
a person could be subjected to such treatment by another human being, Mekhedi
says. Life was already painful under Saddam, and if you came to the prison,
you were always in fear for your life.
Newsweek, April 28, 2003
------
Almost as large as Saddam's palaces are
his many prisons, where countless Iraqis were tortured and killed. We take you now inside one of Saddam's most
notorious prisons, 18 miles west of Baghdad,
and it's hard to imagine a grimmer place.
US
soldiers are searching what remains of one of the biggest and most elaborate prisons
in the world. Saddam Hussein never cut
corners when it came to punishment. Abu
Ghraib once held tens of thousands of human souls -- criminals, political
enemies, and those who just happened to get in the way. A 12-year-old Iranian boy visiting his
grandmother near Basra
in 1985 was swept up in an Iraqi invasion.
He was still here 15 years later.
[H]e lived with 28 other
detainees in a nine-meter-square cell, dividing up 1.5 kilos of rice and
porridge a day. It was so cramped we couldn't sleep on our backs, we had to
sleep on our sides, like spoons. And they brought us polluted water to drink,
so we all had diarrhea. Ulga was released last fall during Saddam's surprise
general amnesty. Most people don't know that before the amnesty, they executed
450 prisoners so they would never go free, said Ulga.
Newsweek, April 28, 2003
------
The massive prison cast a shadow over the entire neighborhood.
Yehiye Ahmed, 17, grew up nearby. The prison guards were his neighbors; the
inmates' screams were the soundtrack of his young life. I could hear the
prisoners crying all the time, especially when someone was killed. I could hear
everything from my house or when we played soccer behind the prison, says
Yehiye, a quiet boy, with large, haunted brown eyes and a body that suggests
malnourishment.
Yehiye and his friends would often go inside the Abu Ghraib
compound to sell sandwiches and cigarettes to visitors, guards, and sometimes
even prisoners. I saw three guards beat a man to death with sticks and cables.
When they got tired, the guards would switch with other guards, he recalls. I
could only watch for a minute without getting caught, but I heard the screams,
and it went on for an hour.
Newsweek, April 28, 2003
------
When Shias, both
leaders and young religious students, were taken into custody, they were often
transferred to special torture cells
. The method of the investigations was
usually to hang someone upside down and beat them, hammering hard on their
bones, Mr. Abu Sakkar said, pointing to a hook on the ceiling.
Some people
would be left here for days upside down and would just die of fatigue and
thirst.
The
Daily Telegraph, April
23, 2003
------
General Jawdat al-Obeidi, the proclaimed
deputy head of the Baghdad provisional
government, said that about 150 political prisoners were found by US troops in
a secret prison in Salman Pak, 35 kilometres south of Baghdad, and another 200
were rescued at a spot he refused to name. In Kadhimiya, a primarily Shiite
neighbourhood in Baghdad, 25 people were
discovered in an underground prison, he said.
Before Baghdad fell, the guards
let water flow into the cells to kill the prisoners before they themselves
fled. But the prisoners were smart and built ramps to climb on top of. That's
why they didn't drown.
Sydney
Morning Herald, April 22, 2003
-------
Well, in the beginning, this place looks
just like an anonymous office building.
And that made it all the more filled with terror, because slowly,
prisoners would come up, tell you that they had been held here, that they had
been tortured. You look at the walls,
and see graffiti written by the prisoners here.
And it's heartbreaking, really.
Allah, help me. Or, you know,
today I'm alive, but tomorrow Ill be underground. You see Iraqi families wandering around
trying to find news of relatives, and finding nothing. I was about to leave when a group of agitated
Iraqis came up and said, come with me. I
have something to show you. It's an
execution ground. There are still some
bodies there. So I said, ok. Let's go take a look. And indeed, we drove to a very remote part of
the prison. It was like a makeshift
execution ground. You know, somebody had
just hurriedly set some guys up there and shot them. They had been half-buried in the ground.
Newsweek reporter Melinda Liu interviewed on NBC Nightly News, April 22, 2003
------
Upstairs, accessible by a back stairway only, are about 100
individual cells, dark and windowless, stinking of urine. In one sits a plate
of half-eaten food, biscuits and rice, still resting on a green plastic tray.
At the end of a hallway lies a pile of bindings and blindfolds.
An elevator, the only one in the place, leads to the basement and
more cells. There are shackles in one room, long cables in another. On another
floor there is a small operating room, where some former prisoners said doctors
harvested the organs of those who did not survive.
Finally, out back, stand three portable morgues, metal buildings
the size of tool sheds, with freezer units attached. Inside one are six
aluminum trays, each the length of a body.
The New York Times, April 21, 2003
------
After he arrived in Baghdad, he was placed in a darkened room with only
a small red light, no bed. Guards would splash buckets of water through a small
gap in the bottom of the door to put an inch or two of water on the floor so
that he could not sleep. They gave him tea and a piece of bread for breakfast.
Rice and a piece of bread for lunch. He went to the bathroom in his room, on
the floor.
The Baltimore Sun, April
20, 2003
------
Adnan Agari, who never returned, was taken away with his brother
Ghassan and his cousin Khatar. They were taken to Baghdad and tortured with electrified wire,
Ghassan said. The screaming terrified
me, he recalled of the dark, poorly ventilated torture chamber. I was a boy
then, 15. I have never heard anything like that before or since.
The New York Times, April 17, 2003
------
The Guardian, April
17, 2003
------
Sheikh Lami Abbas Ajali
looked around at the small cell where he spent several bleak weeks of his life
and recounted the torture: How he was hit, prodded, had his eyelids pulled
back, electric shocks applied to his temples and genitals, how he was
handcuffed with tight manacles and then lifted into the air from behind.
He
recalled Saturday how torturers stuffed 10 suspects into an eight-foot by
six-foot room so only two could sleep at any given time while the other eight
were forced to stand. And how he was kept blindfolded, never quite sure where
he was, where they were taking him, what would hit him next.
Gulf News on line (UAE), April 14, 2003
------
Hassan Ali Rasan has clawed for days in the rubble
of the Detention and Security Center,
searching for a piece of hope.
Amid twisted wire, bricks and unexploded
rocket-propelled grenades, Rasan hunts for traces of his cousin Kasem, missing
for 12 years since Saddam Husseins agents paid him a visit when he was a
student.
Hes an only child. His mother cries every time
she thinks of him, explained Rasan, 25, a muscular ex-soldier who on Sunday
patiently picked through documents and files that litter the crumbled torture
chamber, blitzed by U.S.
warplanes two weeks ago.
Knight-Ridder Newspapers,
April 14, 2003
------
They wandered
the abandoned corridors of one of the most frightening buildings in the Middle
East searching for their brothers, desperately trying to ignore
the logic that told them there was little hope of finding them alive. Other
searchers were lifting trapdoors and banging pipes and marble tiles trying to
find the underground cells reputed to hold hundreds of political prisoners
under the ominous headquarters building
The Australian, April
13, 2003
------
Coalition forces have discovered an abandoned
military prison here, where discarded gas masks and used atropine injectors
suggest the recent presence of chemical weapons and human testing.
There was
no sign of what happened to the inmates and no indication of what their crimes
were. But the punishment seems to have
been severe.
There is also evidence of crude torture.
Electric cords snake through a tiny window in one cell, the frayed ends
dangling from an anchor in the ceiling. Similar sets of wires trail into other
concrete rooms.
I'd hate to think of what those clamped onto, said one U.S. soldier, who speculated the far end would be attached to a
generator. It's just evil in here.
At least a half-dozen gas masks were
scattered near the prison's entrance and inside one of the wire-enclosed walkways
of the white cinder-block prison. There were also several spent auto-injectors
of atropine, a powerful drug that is administered as an antidote to nerve gas.
The Washington Times, April 11, 2003
------
Haydar, who played 12 years on Iraq's
junior and senior national teams, said the troubles started in 1986, when he
joined professional team al-Rashid, which was owned by Hussein. When the team
lost, Haydar said, players were imprisoned for several days.
I was tortured for the first time in
1993, after the Iraqi national team lost 2-0 to Jordan, Haydar told ESPN.com.
A few months later, when Haydar
suggested he might not be able to play because of a bleeding ulcer, he was
arrested at his home at 2:30 a.m. and sent
to prison.
He took me right to the Olympic
prison, where the guards whipped my feet 20 times a day for three days, he
said. They gave me nothing to eat or drink other than a daily glass of water
and slice of bread. Then they sent me to al-Radwaniya for four more days of
punishment, and this time, I got the full treatment.
They took my clothes off, laid me down on my back and dragged me by my
legs across hot pavement until my back was a bloody mess. Then they made me
roll in the sand. And just to make sure that the wounds got infected, I had to
climb a 15-foot ladder and jump repeatedly into a pit of sewage water filled
with blood and who knows what else. All
because I wanted to stop playing soccer.
The Miami Herald, April 6, 2003
------
Former Iraqi weightlifter Raed Ahmad, who defected
to the U.S.
during the 1996 Games in Atlanta,
told the Daily News that athletes are
routinely deprived of food and sleep, and the soles of their feet are caned.
They are chained to walls for days, he said, and sometimes thrown into tanks
filled with raw sewage.
The Daily News (New York), April 2, 2003
The Children: No Iraqi Too Small
The Athletes:
A High Price for Defeat
Pervasive Fear
Unspeakable Acts:
Mass Murder
Unspeakable Acts:
Torture
Unspeakable Acts:
Mutilation
Unimaginable Places
-------
The Mukhabarat was not amused.
Agents collected the entire 1,000-copy print run from the Mosul bazaar,
piled the books on the ground and ordered Ahmed to torch them. After that, all
he needed to do to make things right for the regime was to serve nine months of
solitary confinement in a rat-infested cell.
ITV News (UK), April 22, 2003
One of Alis fellow fedayeen lost his tongue simply
for repeating how he had heard of a man who had accused Uday of bringing shame
on the Iraqi people for dressing in multi-coloured shirts which, according to
the critic, made him look like a woman.
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