This Iraqi woman wants the world to know her tragic story so that no one doubts the military action taken against Saddam Hussein
Iraqi Metamorphoses
By Rod Nordland
NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE
April 12 — Hashmia Jassim has such a desperate need to talk about her life as a bug that she beckons three passing strangers into her dwelling. By doing so, she is abandoning an ironclad norm of behavior for a Shiite woman. She pushes the curtain aside that separates the women’s quarters, and, worse, even draws her male guests in by gentle tugs at their wrists. The touch is shocking here in southern Iraq, from a woman of 54 in a black chador.
IT ALL BEGAN, SHE SAYS, one day in 1984 when she was huddled in her neighborhood bomb shelter, during one of the periodic shellings of her hometown of Basra during the Iran-Iraq war. One of the other women there took a dislike to her, and that woman was a paid informer for the Mukhabarat, Saddam Hussein’s secret police. “The bitch told them I tore down Saddam’s portrait,” she says. “It wasn’t even true.” The only thing they regime really had on Hashmia was the conduct of her brother, Abdul Karim Jassim, who had deserted from the Iraqi army after Saddam invaded Iran, and died in front of a firing squad in 1982 at the age of 21. In Saddam’s Iraq, guilt by posthumous association was practically an article of jurisprudence.
That and the snitch’s report was enough to get Hashmia a seven-year prison sentence. Blindfolded, she never even saw which prison she was taken to. 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 jailors scored her back with a hot poker, beat the soles of her feet with sticks, made her pull up her baggy pants and whipped her legs. The sexual humiliation may have been even worse than the pain, but that was serious. “They slapped me so hard that my neck hurts from it even now.” The torturers wanted her to confess to plotting against the Baathist regime, but she knew that would mean a death sentence.
Worse than all that: Hashmia had no idea what had happened to her six kids, who ranged in age from nine to sixteen. She could well imagine. “They were small kids and when they arrested me they didn’t even take any notice of them, even though there was no father in the house.” Divorced from her husband, she had been the children’s only support. Her parents were desperately poor, and already elderly. Worrying about the kids turned her hair gray too. “I’ve seen films where prison made your hair go white overnight, but I never believed it could happen until it happened to me.”
As she feared, her kids ended up on the street while she marked the next four years in jail. Her eldest son, Laith Joumaah, took charge, the man of the family at the age of 13. “Laith quit school to take care of them all. If it wasn’t for him we’d have been lost,” she says. He worked his way up to a job as a mechanic and the kids managed to stay together as a family. The bond between this mother and son is solid and unspoken. Before she relates intimate details of her torture, she asks the rest of the family to leave, but Laith stays quietly behind. She weeps softly, and adjusts her headscarf; draws encouragement in a quick glance at Laith, looks her listeners in the eye and goes on.
After a few months, her tormentors gave up on extracting a confession from her, and she was transferred to Baghdad’s notorious Al Rashidiya prison. The torture stopped, but not the torment. “There were 46 women in a room this size,” she says. It’s no bigger than a normal hotel room. “We slept in the toilet, we lay in our own waste, there were rats and bugs and bats.” Whenever the authorities needed a rent-a-crowd to chant “Long live Saddam,” the prisoners would be bused out of the prison to take part. On his birthday, they were forced to honor him with dancing—not something decent Shiite women do. She says she can’t recall a single kindness from her jailors in all those years. “Even the janitors were filthy to us,” she said. “We were just bugs to them.”
Hashmia was released in 1988 at the end of the Iran-Iraq war in one of the tyrant’s spasms of magnanimity, this one an amnesty to celebrate “victory” over Iran. The war, started by Saddam, cost one million lives and many billions of dollars, but gained not an inch of territory. She found Laith and the others. Was she proud of him? “If it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t still be alive.” How did he feel? “Other people used to make fun of us because my mother was in jail,” he says. “I was proud of her just because she was my mom.”
Tragedy wouldn’t leave them alone. In 1991, the American coalition invaded Iraq, encouraging a Shiite rebellion, and then abandoning it. Hashmia’s 18-year-old son, Mohammed Joumah, was swept up in the spirit of the protests, and when Iraqi forces savagely suppressed the uprising, Mohammed was among unknown thousands massacred in the streets under the direction of Major General Ali “Chemical” Majid. Saddam’s favorite cousin is better known for gassing the Kurds, but in Basra he’ll always be remembered as the Shiites’ worst butcher.
Laith was taken from her again last year, drafted when war loomed with the Americans and the British. He was sent to the Iraqi Tenth Army Division, defending Amara, a city about 120 miles from Basra. During the run-up to war, leaflets fluttered from the skies, calling for soldiers to desert and abandon Saddam Hussein. “The leaflets had a big effect on us,” Laith says. But coalition missiles on the first day of war galvanized the troops. Of the 100 soldiers in his company, all deserted, in groups of seven and eight. “I think the officers pretended not to notice.” He ditched his uniform and his boots, and walked barefoot down the road to Basra.
Laith was home by the time British tanks and infantry took Basra on April 6. “The army was hiding among our homes,” Hashmia says. A jet flying close air support bombed their house. And that is where Hashmia’s life as a bug ends. “The coalition destroyed my home,” she says. “But I’m not angry.”
The family all survived. Friends in the Andalosa neighborhood of Basra told them of an abandoned building and they loaded what possessions they could recover onto a pickup truck and went to have a look. The Jassims recognized the building right away. “You could not even pass by these places before,” she says. “This was the day I’ve been waiting all my life to see, when places like this were finished with.” The previous occupants had all fled, and the Jassim family gaily moved into the neighborhood Baathist Party headquarters. “It’s like I’m in a waking dream,” she says, “staying in the house of the Baath.”
They’ve had to do a little redecorating in their new home. In the party office that became women’s quarters, Hashmia put up a wicker wall hanging displaying an array of photographs of all six of her children. The occupants then sent someone to try to get the Brits to come over and clear that arms cache from the back room; they have yet to come, so it’s still piled high with mortars, rockets, grenades, .50 caliber machine gun belts, the essentials of a political party run by thugs. Hashmia ripped down the huge Saddam poster outside, and tore his portraits from the walls inside. She smiles at that little irony. Laith touches her shoulder lightly, to interject. “I know that we don’t have electricity and that we don’t have water, but I also know that the coalition is not here to hurt us, and that we have freedom.”
Hashmia releases her visitors. All she wants, she says, is for her story to reach “some big officers in the coalition.” Maybe they’ll read this, she says. They should know that, at least as far as Hashmia Jassim is concerned, they did the right thing.
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