June 3, 2003
Tales of Saddam's Brutality
For more personal stories of life after Saddam, visit Liberation Update. For more information on Coalition assistance to protect mass graves, click here.
"Now, 12 years later, Mr. Shaati cannot remember if the women and children beside
him screamed as the bullets hit, or whether the men in the hole moaned as they died.
He only recalls a moment of hollow silence when the soldiers stopped shooting.
Then came the throaty rumble of a backhoe and the thud of wet earth dropping on bodies.
He survived but saw hundreds of other innocents buried in another of Saddam Hussein's
anonymous mass graves." ------
"The soldiers took them out in groups of 100 to 150 people. When his time came,
Mr. Shaati was ordered to remove his T-shirt and rip it into strips that were tied over
his eyes and around his hands. The prisoners were herded onto a bus, everyone holding on
with their teeth to the shirt of the person in front of them. When they arrived at a field -
Mr. Shaati is still not sure where - their grave had already been prepared. 'They led us
down an incline into a wide long hole,' he said. 'It was quiet. No one fell or even cried.
I was positioned very close to the corner, maybe second or third from the wall. Then they
started shooting. Somehow I wasn't hit. By then, I guess, they didn't go to the trouble of
shooting all of us.' After the grave was covered, Mr. Shaati, alive but choking on dirt,
wormed his way out of the ditch. He punched through the earthen blanket with his head, and
worked himself free of the cloth straps. Gulping the cold night air, he knew that all his
soldierly ideas about honor and country counted for nothing." ------
"The executions took place two or three times on most days, Arjawi said. Each time, between
100 and 150 blindfolded people, their hands and sometimes feet bound, were led into pits about
10 feet deep. Gunmen then fired into the pit, often for several minutes, Arjawi said. A bulldozer
then pushed dirt onto the bodies, sometimes burying or crushing people who had survived the
volley and were trying to climb out." ------
"[J]ust to see the landscape of bones mixed with clothing, skulls strewn in the splay of human detritus and other remains is chilling. At first, it just seems like hundreds of bundles of clothes have been laid out on the dikes and roads that cut through the marshes here. "Then the traces of human anatomy appear. A femur from a leg, a humerus from an arm, a shard of pelvis, and skull peeking out from a gray blanket that someone assembling remains laid down. The bundles reveal themselves as the former repositories of living human flesh, before the gunfire sent them on their journey into the marsh.
"'It's a kind of hell out there,' said Mr. Nasir, who no longer plants onions where so many
bodies have been desecrated. 'We have always known that there were people here, but we
couldn't take them,' he said. 'We knew our Muslim brothers were not buried properly, but we
couldn't say a word.'" ------
"'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 brother's 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.'" ------
"The skeletal remains on display Monday showed signs of physical trauma. Some still had
faded bandages tied around the eye sockets and black cloth binding the feet. Several
skulls had large holes on one side or were crushed in the back. In each open wooden
coffin, the bones were carefully wrapped in white cloth, surrounded by scraps of hair,
bits of teeth and bones. The visible evidence of their demise drove scores of black-clad
women to wailing and men to weep." ------
"The grave was no more than a long trench, with dirt shoveled over the men executed for their role in the uprising here in 1999 after the killing of a prominent Shiite cleric, Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, said relatives who viewed the remains today.
"On March 25, 1999, a shepherd in the desert about 45 miles north of Basra saw men
being brought by Baath Party trucks to an open clearing, said Ali Hassan, 20. The
shepherd said he saw a backhoe dig a long trench and the men, blindfolded, were lined
up in front of the ditch. Then they were shot." ------ "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." ------ "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 Baath regime has gone and now we can talk freely with you. They [the 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." ------
"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." ------ "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." ------ "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".'" ------
"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." ------ "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." ------
"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.'" ------ "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 (Ba'ath 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." ------ "'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." ------ "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.'" [ Top of Page ]
"'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." ------ "A chef at Baghdad's exclusive Hunting Club recalls a wedding party that Uday crashed in the late 1990s. After Uday left the hall, the bride, a beautiful woman from a prominent family, went missing. 'The bodyguards closed all the doors, didn't let anybody out,' the chef remembers. 'Women were yelling and crying, "What happened to her?"' The groom knew. 'He took a pistol and shot himself,' says the chef, placing his forefinger under his chin.
"Last October another bride, 18, was dragged, resisting, into a guardhouse on one of
Uday's properties, according to a maid who worked there. The maid says she saw a guard
rip off the woman's white wedding dress and lock her, crying, in a bathroom. After Uday
arrived, the maid heard screaming. Later she was called to clean up. The body of the
woman was carried out in a military blanket, she said. There were acid burns on her
left shoulder and the left side of her face. The maid found bloodstains on Uday's
mattress and clumps of black hair and peeled flesh in the bedroom. A guard told her,
"Don't say anything about what you see, or you and your family will be finished." ------
"At Baghdad's teeming Al-Mutanabi book market, Ali al-Saadi held up a gilded Islamist
book and recalled the one he said led to his torture in one of Saddam Hussein's military
prisons. 'When I was a literature student in 1982, intelligence officers found a book
by Mohammed Sadeq Sadr in my house,' said Saadi of the Shiite ayatollah whose 1999
murder was widely attributed to Saddam's Sunni-majority regime. 'They accused me of
organizing a political group. I spent three years in jail and suffered a lot,' he said,
showing scars on his wrists from prison chains and gaps where he said three teeth had
been pulled out with pliers. Saadi was just one of many writers and thinkers at the
weekly market who celebrated being able to buy and sell books that were illegal under
the old regime." ------ "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." ------
"'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.'" ------
"Uday's favourite punishment was the medieval falaqa, a rod with clamps that go
around the ankles so that the offender, feet in the air, can be hit on the bare
soles with a stick. A top official in radio and TV says he received so many beatings
for trivial mistakes like being late for meetings or making grammatical errors on
his broadcasts that Uday ordered him to carry a falaqa in his car. Uday also had an
iron maiden that he used to torture Iraqi athletes whose performance disappointed
him. ------
"Uday's physical ailments seemed to heighten his sadistic tendencies. According
to his chief bodyguard, when Uday learned that one of his close comrades, who
knew of his many misdeeds, was planning to leave Iraq, he invited him to his
37th-birthday party and had him arrested. An eyewitness at the prison where the
man was held says members of the Fedayeen grabbed his tongue with pliers and
sliced it off with a scalpel so he could not talk. A maid who cleaned one of
Uday's houses says she once saw him lop off the ear of one of his guards and
then use a welder's torch on his face." ------ "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." ------ "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." ------ "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." ------
"'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.'" ------
"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 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." ------ "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." ------
"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." ------
"'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 Uday's
office. He asked us to bring his head.'" ------
"'As I began to cut Uday's hair, this man [Uday's press secretary] was praying
as they [Uday's bodyguards] extracted his teeth with pliers. But my hands didn't
shake. I was always very careful. I knew a small mistake would be the end of me.'" ------ "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. ------
"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." ------
"I was sitting outside my father's 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." ------
"'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.'" ------ "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.
"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." ------ "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.'" ------ "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." ------ "The Baath Party completely dominated life in Iraq. Until this week, every neighborhood 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.'" ------
"...[S]ecret police thugs brutalized even senior officials of the Information Ministry,
just to keep them in line (one such official has long been missing all his fingernails).
One Foreign Ministry officer told me of a colleague who, finding out his brother had
been executed by the regime, was forced, as a test of loyalty, to write a letter of
congratulations on the act to Saddam Hussein. An aide to Uday once told me why he had
no front teeth: henchmen had ripped them out with pliers and told him never to wear
dentures, so he would always remember the price to be paid for upsetting his boss." ------ "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." ------
"The Baath Party completely dominated life in Iraq. Until this week, every neighborhood
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.'" ------ "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." ------ "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." [ Top of Page ] "She spent one year being moved from prison to torture center to prison and back. Her tormenters would hang her from a hook in the ceiling by her arms, which were bound behind her back. Sometimes they added electric shocks. Sometimes they beat her on the soles of her feet until they were engorged with blood and her toenails fell off. She was 25. "'I was lucky that I became like a dead body,' she said. 'I didn't know what was going on around me. There was no water, no bathroom. The only food was two big pots they brought in, one with dirty rice and one of soup. You had to fight for it. If you were strong and healthy, you'd get food. If you were weak, you'd wait.'
"After the torture came the sham trial, then a sentence to spend her life at Rashad
women's prison, a maze of unheated cells where the sewage would float from the one
toilet down the corridors and seep onto the women's rough mattresses." ------
"First they broke his right arm with a pipe. Then they punctured his right eardrum
with a skewer. And then they tried to break his right leg with a bat. But when the
X-rays that Uday Hussein demanded as proof of their efficiency showed in fact they
had not broken Tariq Abdul Whab's leg, his captors took him back to prison where
someone smashed his right leg with such ferocity that his toe hit his kneecap.
Mr. Whab received all this treatment simply because Uday thought the sports
television reporter was being disloyal to him by talking to soccer players he didn't
like." ------
"...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.'" ------
"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].'" ------
"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.'" ------ "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." ------ "'Me.' 'Me.' 'Me,' they murmured in response to the question: Whose father, brother, son had been executed by Saddam Hussein's 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
Hussein's government began a systematic campaign of oppression, execution and
internal exile against them." ------
"'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." ------ "An Iraqi soldier, who according to the facility's records witnessed the beatings, said interrogators regularly used pliers to remove men's teeth, electric prods to shock men's 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 directorate's files." ------ "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 facility's administrative office, said the intelligence officers of the facility programmed the prison's 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 there's 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.'" ------
"'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.'" ------ "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 Hassoun's 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 Hussein's amnesty
declarations and later told her story to Hassoun. Her current whereabouts are unclear." ------
"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." Hashmia's jailers 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." ------ "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.'" ------
"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." ------
"...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." [ Top of Page ]
"Uday's physical ailments seemed to heighten his sadistic tendencies. According to his
chief bodyguard, when Uday learned that one of his close comrades, who knew of his many
misdeeds, was planning to leave Iraq, he invited him to his 37th-birthday party and had
him arrested. An eyewitness at the prison where the man was held says members of the
Fedayeen grabbed his tongue with pliers and sliced it off with a scalpel so he could
not talk. A maid who cleaned one of Uday's houses says she once saw him lop off the ear
of one of his guards and then use a welder's torch on his face." ------
"Thousands of people are missing in Iraq, victims of Saddam Hussein's 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. Hussein's
powerful security services." ------ "Farris Salman is one of the last victims of Mr. Hussein's rule. His speech is slurred because he is missing part of his tongue. Black-hooded paramilitary troops, the Fedayeen Saddam, run by Mr. Hussein's 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. Salman's mother was ordered to
bring a picture of Mr. Hussein. Two men held Mr. Salman's 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." ------ "... 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....'" ------ "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.'" ------ "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.'" ------ "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.'" ------ "One of Ali's 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.
"'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 one's tongue cut off by us.'" ------ "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." ------ "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.'" [ Top of Page ]
"Her most disturbing memory is of the time she felt nothing but her own pain.
After the beatings and electric shocks, Suriya Abdel Khader would find herself
once again in the fetid cell, a room so crowded that most prisoners could only
stand. The women died upright, then slumped to the floor, but Ms. Abdel Khader
remembers registering only a dull flash of annoyance whenever that happened.
'Get this body out of the way,' she would think to herself. 'It's taking up
room.' She was imprisoned, she believes, because her four brothers had been
arrested in Mr. Hussein's blanket crackdown on Shiites suspected of supporting
Iran or the Islamic Dawa Party." ------ "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.'" ------
"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." ------ "A nondescript five-story building notable only by the extra barbed wire on the roof, the Haakimiya Prison is actually 10 stories. Below ground 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." ------
"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.'" ------ "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." ------
"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.'" ------
"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 I'll 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." ------ "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." ------
"'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.'" ------
"There in the corridor were the punishment units where men were stuffed into
windowless cinder block cells, one metre by 50cm. On the left was the yellow
holding pen where prisoners fought to sleep next to the open pits that served as
latrines, suffering the stench for a few inches more space." ------ "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.'" ------
"Some former inmates say that in the 1990s, the prison became so crowded, Saddam's
son, Uday, ordered hundreds executed to make room for more." ------
"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..." ------ "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." ------
"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 Hussein's agents paid him a visit when he was
a student.
"'He's 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. ------
"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." [ Top of Page ] The Disappeared: Living with the Terror "Clawing through the dirt, Abdelhassan al-Mohani collected his brother bone by bone. He knelt in a hole at the edge of a cemetery near the village of Muhammad Sakran, just outside Baghdad. The faded writing on a plastic armband in the grave told him this was his brother, Abdelhussein. Mr. Mohani held the skull and gently brushed the dirt from the eye socket. Then he wept.
"Abdelhussein had disappeared on his way to work in Baghdad on Jan. 23,
1981. His family never heard a word from the government, but eventually
they drew the obvious conclusion: as a Shiite, he must have been arrested
in the Islamic Dawa Party roundup." ------
"At the first grave site that the team is investigating - a bleak square-mile
expanse of sand and silt near the town of Musayib, 40 miles south of
Baghdad - local people have already dug up the skeletal remains of almost
650 victims. Blindfolded with their hands tied, they had been herded into
trenches and shot - executed in March and April 1991 during the failed uprising
that followed the first Gulf war. Some were buried alive when the holes were
filled in over them by bulldozer. In a race against time, it is now up to the
scientists from Inforce (the International Forensic Centre), a British charity
set up 18 months ago to investigate mass killings and genocide, to persuade their
relatives not to uncover any more bodies so that vital forensic evidence is kept
intact." ------
"In two days, they've found 2,000 bodies--men, women, children, some handicapped.
Many skeletons were still blindfolded. The Iraqis and the US military believe
there are several thousand more. This is an archaeological site. And it's no
accident the bodies were buried here. Under Saddam Hussein, it was illegal for
Iraqis to dig here, or even walk on the site. Search teams look for identification
inside crumbling wallets, adding each name to a ledger. If there's no ID, they
hope a relative might recognize something -- a watch, a scarf." ------
"Hundreds of Iraqis whose loved ones vanished during the 1991 Shiite Muslim
uprising watched Tuesday as workers dug into a mass grave, a backhoe pulling
up eight or nine bodies at a time, and perhaps as many as 3,000 over the past four
days. Villagers clutched the remains to their chests, trying to keep them intact
as they fell from the machine's big shovel. They laid the bodies in the dirt
nearby, next to hundreds of others waiting to be claimed. Then they searched for
personal papers, the remnants of a wristwatch or other items that might reveal
the identities of the dead." ------
"Seven days into the dig, the scene resembles a battlefield of the dead, the loose
sandy soil carved into trenches, ditches and foxholes by a bulldozer. All around
lie piles of remains: pelvic bones, ribs, femurs and skulls--one still wearing its
weave-pattern prayer cap, another the blindfold affixed by his killers shortly before
death. From many protrude the identity cards, amber necklaces, front-door keys and
watches used by relatives to identify their brothers, cousins and sons. A plastic
artificial leg sticks out of one pile, two crutches from another." ------
"For people streaming past 32 coffins laid out in Basra's al-Jumhuriya Grand Mosque on
Monday, grief competed with anger as they searched for relatives who disappeared after
a Shiite Muslim uprising in 1999. Peering into a simple plywood coffin, Karima Musa
Mohammed carefully looked over the remains inside--a ragged blindfold tied around the
skull, feet bound by black cloth, faded gray pants, light gray shirt. 'No, not him.
Not my son,' she pronounced, then burst into tears. The mass grave was one of many
being unearthed around the country as Iraqis come to grips with the reality of Saddam
Hussein's brutal regime." ------ "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." ------
"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.'" ------
"'My brother disappeared in 1992,' this woman told us. 'We never heard another
thing from him.' He and hundreds of others buried here were Shi'ite Muslims, Saddam's
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 didn't keep track. The
cemetery's caretaker did. There must be thousands of people in this book. Thousands
of names. Under penalty of death, this man stole Saddam Hussein's 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." ------
"As clumps of hair blew across the hard, dry land, Jabar Sattar sat
rocking and sobbing on a hill of dirt created by the backhoe. He
cradled a clear plastic bag containing the remains of his younger
brother Faris. Faris was a soldier, he said, and had just returned
from Kuwait when private security men arrested him in his front yard,
just two miles from the grave site. 'I looked for 12 years,' Sattar
cried into the bag of remains. 'Every day I told myself, you're alive
and will come back. Now what am I going to say to our father?'" ------
"Desperate relatives and friends were digging to find remains of their
loved ones yesterday at what US soldiers said was the largest mass grave
of Saddam Hussein's victims discovered in Iraq. ... Seven days into the
dig, the scene resembles a battlefield of the dead: the loose sandy soil
carved into trenches, ditches and foxholes by a bulldozer. All around lie
piles of remains: pelvic bones, ribs, femurs and skulls -- one still
wearing its weave-pattern prayer cap, another the blindfold affixed by
his killers shortly before death. From many protrude the identity cards,
amber necklaces, front-door keys and watches used by relatives to identify
their brothers, cousins and sons. A plastic artificial leg sticks out of
one pile, two crutches from another." ------
"On an exhumed mound beside the most westerly row of corpses, Ali Abdul
Hassan Mekki, 50, sat with a plastic bag between his feet. Thirteen years
ago his brother, Jaffar, disappeared during Hussein's post-rebellion slaughter.
It was, for him, the worst possible outcome -- misery without certainty.
'I think this is my brother,' he said. 'This is my pullover, which he always
borrowed from me to wear, but it is not enough to identify him. The problem
is that I don't recognise this wallet and the identity card does not have any
writing on it.'" ------ "A map provided by a former driver for Iraqi military intelligence brought Abdulaziz al-Qubaisi Abu Musab to the abandoned Iraqi military camp here this morning in search of the answer to the question that most Kuwaitis have asked - and dreaded - since the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf war: where are the nearly 600 missing Kuwaitis? "Mr. Abu Musab, a member of the Iraqi National Congress, the political movement headed by Ahmad Chalabi, said he had been given the map by a man who, in October 1991, was among the drivers who took the Kuwaiti prisoners to their execution in Baghdad and subsequent burial here, 50 miles west of the capital.
"It was impossible to speak directly to this driver, who calls himself
Samir and still fears for his life, or to say today how accurate his
account of the execution is. But the map he gave Mr. Abu Musab proved
very accurate." ------ "The killing began one morning in October 1991 at 8:30. The frightened Kuwaitis - blindfolded, with hands bound by lime-green plastic ties - were ordered into horseshoe formations at the training school for the intelligence service in Baghdad. The prisoners had been brought there that morning in vans and buses. "A single intelligence man carrying a machine gun positioned himself inside the horseshoe. The prisoners wept and cried out the Muslim prayer before death: there is no god but God.
"The gunfire began. The shooter pivoted, according to the account provided
to Mr. Abu Musab, using the horseshoe formation to make the executions
quicker. Formation after formation was brought forward until all were
dead. All were men, save one." ------ "An intensive search for Kuwaiti soldiers and civilians missing since the first Persian Gulf war may have ended at this remote site, where skulls, brown pants and bones sticking up eerily from the sand were unearthed in the first day of digging at the site. "When Saddam Hussein fell, there were grim hopes that the missing might still be alive but starving in one of the regime's prisons. Coalition searches found the prisons empty. Instead, it now appears the Kuwaitis were already dead.
"Ten buses carrying the 'disappeared' had been driven northwest of Baghdad
past the relatively prosperous city of Fallujah, according to the driver
of one of the buses. The prisoners were unloaded, shot, then buried in deep
pits." ------ "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 Iraq's 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, Jamal's 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 can't accept that they are missing.'" ------ "'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 didn't believe Saddam Hussein is gone, that it's 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. 'It's Abdul Rahman, it's Abdul Rahman,'
people in the crowd shouted. ------ "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." ------ "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." ------
"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.'" ------ "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 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.'" [ Top of Page ] The Children: No Iraqi Too Small
"His mother tried to keep him close, but her hands were tied and she could
not hold the children. They all stumbled into the ready-made grave. 'They
were shooting at us, but I didn't get hit,' Mr. Husseini said. 'I was lying
on top of my mother. Then someone came down in the hole and dragged me up
by my collar and yelled, "Shoot this kid!" I was pretending to be dead. And
they started shooting at me again, but still I didn't get hit. Then the
shovel came.' He felt himself being lifted with the dirt and dropped once
again into the hole. 'I rolled myself to the edge and then to a place where
there were reeds and water and the reeds were all sticking in my face,' he
recalled. 'My body wasn't covered with the dirt, just my head. I could breath
but I didn't move. A man came to check and was standing over the hole where
everyone was buried and he called to the shovel driver, "Come and cover this
kid." But the driver, maybe he didn't hear, because he didn't come.'" ------
"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." ------
"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." ------ "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.'" ------
"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." [ Top of Page ] The Athletes: A High Price for Defeat "Abas Rahim, a speedy 24-year-old left wing for Police, is one of Iraq's finest players. After returning home from 1997 Junior World Cup qualifying matches in South Korea, Rahim was jailed for 21 days. He was the team captain, as well as the tournament's most valuable player, and he was punished for the team's failure.
"Five years later, after trying to quit the team, Rahim missed a crucial
penalty kick against the Union Club in Qatar. He was held captive in
Hussein's Republican Palace for seven days, he recalled, blindfolded the
entire time. Today, he played unafraid." ------
"Two years ago, Iraqi wrestler Maitham Ali Hadi was competing in
the Arab championships in Syria and defected. When the delegation
returned home without him, its members were imprisoned and tortured.
The punishment - which included wrestlers, coaches, journalists and
referees - was a message to others who might have been considering
defections. Even the chairman and the secretary of the wrestling
federation were imprisoned, though they weren't in Syria during the
tournament. 'At night, we used to hear the voices of our colleagues
being tortured. We felt their pain alongside them,' former wrestling
federation head Loai Sateh said in a recent interview." ------
"Fakher Ali al-Jamali, who headed Iraq's handicapped team, was whipped
with electric cables for two days after two members of his team went
missing during a 1998 tournament. He was released only after they
showed up." ------
"One of the tools used by Odai to torture athletes is currently on
display at al-Hikma Mosque in Baghdad. It is a 2-meter (6-foot) body
suit of metal bars that was used to restrain offending athletes under
the scorching sun for hours. One athlete who spoke on condition of
anonymity said he was placed in the suit for long hours under blistering
sun. A hose dripped water into his mouth to prevent him from dying of
dehydration. 'Whenever I tried to move my body, I would feel the burn
of the metal rods,' said the man, displaying scarred legs and hands." ------ "'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 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 we'd 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 Uday's 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.'" ------
"'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.'" ------
"'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.' Iraq's 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 'Uday's men,' told AFP that such violence
was widespread in the dark years of Saddam's 24-year rule. 'I was tortured
because I'd criticised the government's sport policies,' he said. 'They
took me to one of their special prisons. They blindfolded me and then
tortured me with electricity.'" ------
"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." ------
"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." ------ "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.'" [ Top of Page ]
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