"They Would Beat Us Hard Before Interrogations"
News: For many Iraqis, descriptions of Saddam's horrific rule sound a lot like Iraq's present.
December 8, 2005
|
|
AMMAN, Jordan —As Saddam Hussein's trial got underway this week, witnesses described the torture that took place in the former Iraqi president's prisons, bringing to mind the horrors of the former regime. But for an increasing number of people, those descriptions sound frighteningly like Iraq's present.
Last month, American soldiers in Baghdad raided a basement prison run by the Ministry of Interior's security forces and found nearly 200 prisoners, many of them starving and showing signs of having been tortured.
Just as with allegations of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in spring of last year, many ordinary Iraqis considered the abuse taking place in ministry of interior prisons a fact before it was acknowledged by the outside world. Munather Al-Samarraie is a former Interior Ministry official who says he spoke out about the abuse three months ago before fleeing to Amman, fearing for his safety.
The prison the troops raided, Al-Samarraie said, is not the only one being run by the ministry without any oversight. He named six prisons in Baghdad, and said there are others around the country.
"The one in Nissoor Square is the largest," he said, referring to a ministry building in central Baghdad inside one of Saddam's old palaces, the perimeter of which is guarded by US troops. "It can hold more than one thousand prisoners. There is also a prison in the Wolf Brigade headquarters that can hold about one thousand inside the Ministry of Interior compound."
Al-Samarraie said the conditions in the prisons vary and described the prison that the U.S. recently raided, which is in Baghdad's Jadriyah neighborhood.
"Jadriyah prison didn't have enough food. They had one bathroom for 200 people and they fed the prisoners three times each week, or sometimes twice. There are no windows. When they take a prisoner from a room to the interrogation room, they usually blindfold them and handcuff them so they won't see anything," he said. The Interior Ministry compound that houses the prison has been the site of frequent attacks by insurgents.
Al-Samarraie repeated allegations made by others that the arrests have been carried out by members of the Badr Brigade, the armed wing of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the conservative Shiite party whose members did well in last January's national elections and whose leadership currently controls the Interior Ministry. Al-Samarraie says the Badr Brigade, in some cases, had been reborn as ministry special forces units known as the Wolf Brigade and the Scorpion Brigade. He also noted that in addition to the arrests and torture, these Shiite groups carry out extrajudicial killings and raids after dark, often targeting Sunnis believed to be lending support to the insurgency.
Al-Samarraie said US forces were aware of the abuse long before the raid and that because of the 11 pm curfew enforced by U.S. troops in Baghdad, after-curfew raids could only ever be conducted by the Ministry of Interior's forces with U.S. consent. Al-Samarraie says the U.S. military was only prompted to raid the prison after MOI forces arrested fifteen-year-old Amar Hussein, whose uncle lives in the United States and has connections to a U.S. congressman.
"They know about all of them. The Americans have sovereignty over the night," he said.
Abdul Kareem Abdul Razzaq, the imam of Umm Al-Mukhtar Mosque in Baghdad's Yarmuk neighborhood, has been arrested twice since the US invasion. He spent seven days in the custody of the US military in October 2003, and says he was beaten then and forced to stand in stress positions, such as on one leg, for long periods of time. After his arrest by Interior Ministry forces in May of this year, he decided to leave the country, and now resides in the suburbs of Amman, Jordan, with his family.
"They would beat us hard before interrogations," he said. "Then they would take us for interrogations and they would have confessions prepared on sheets of paper. They would have a list of things that they had done — raping women, bombings. If they did not confess, there were electric shocks, they pulled out fingernails. They would hang us. They would shock us with electricity and we would lose consciousness. Some of them, they just confessed, even if they had not done anything. There were young men who were dying."
Razzaq said he spent most of the time handcuffed and blindfolded, but said he removed his blindfold at one point after regaining consciousness while momentarily unattended in the Nissoor prison.
"They were torturing another man. They made him sit on a bottle."
Razzaq shows off a chemical burn on his foot.
"When prisoners were uncooperative, they would drip chemicals randomly. In my case, it landed on my foot."
Burns on his back, he said, have disappeared.
"I think they used an iron on my back," he said. "If it wasn't dangerous for their parents in Baghdad for them to speak, I would bring you ten or twenty young men here in Amman who have been tortured.
Razzaq was released after 16 days in MOI custody. He has no plans to return to Iraq. "Unless the government changes, I will not be going back," he said.
Peggy Gish is an American activist who has spent more than eighteen months in Iraq during the last three years with the Christian Peace Team, one of the last foreign groups monitoring human rights in Iraq. She was most recently in the country in August, and says that she and her colleagues conducted interviews with former prisoners that backed up Al-Samarraie's assertions, including the charge that American advisors were present in the Ministry of Interior. The Wolf and Scorpion Brigades, which have also been accused of carrying out extrajudicial killings, received training from U.S. forces.
"These are illegal prisons because the only legal prisons are supposed to be under the Ministry of Justice. In particular cases we worked with, people had been randomly picked up by the brigades and were taken and tortured and forced to confess to a crime."
Gish says that in addition to the torture and coerced confessions, there have been an increase in the number of bodies turning up around Baghdad with marks of torture, some of them still bound in what some say are police handcuffs.
"People are very scared. We'll get lots of people saying "we know more stories than are being reported," she said. "It's really slowing down our reporting. We know there's just a lot more. People just aren't coming forth. If it's found out, their whole family could be killed."
David Enders is the author of Baghdad Bulletin: Dispatches on the American Occupation.
