A Regime Of Torture
Living to tell of Saddam's chamber of horrors
Basra, Iraq
THESE THINGS happened.
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.
These men, and countless thousands of others here in southern Iraq, tell tales of police roundups and arbitrary arrests, of informers and score settling, all of which led to dark cells and excruciating, seemingly endless encounters with torturers, laughing, often drunk men, who relished in the pain they inflicted on their victims.
In more than two dozen interviews with men in and around Basra who were victims of torture - women here, though sometimes torture victims themselves, are reluctant in this socially conservative Shiite society to recount the humiliation they endured at the hands of male tormentors - it is clear that the regime of Saddam Hussein routinely employed torture as an instrument of state. Many torture victims simply disappeared.
This was, for Iraqis, a land of pervasive and undiluted terror.
Hanging From the Ceiling
They came first for Nabil Abdul Ali's brother, Aziz, at their home in Abu Khasib, just outside Basra. "They accused him of being in the intifada in 1999," Ali said, referring to a Shiite uprising against the Baghdad regime after the murder of the Shiite Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Sadiq Al Sader and his two sons by the regime in the Shiite holy city of Najaf. "After a week or 10 days, the Baath Party," Hussein's ruling apparatus, "came to our house and destroyed it with bulldozers."
When Ali's father went to look for his son, the police arrested him as well. "We fled to Karbala," another Shiite sacred city to the north, Ali said. "But the Mukharabat" - the secret police - "came there and took all my family. They tortured all of us." Altogether, said the 35-year-old Ali, eleven people in his family, including five women and two children, were arrested. Ali said he was tortured the worst.
"They tied my hands behind me and hung me from the ceiling," he said. "They wrapped a wire around my penis and turned a crank on an electrical generator. They put electric wires under my nails. The torture was so painful no one could stand it."
So excruciating was his ordeal that Ali said he was willing to say anything to stay the hand of his tormentors. "I didn't confess because I had nothing to confess," he said. "But in the end I would say anything. I would say my brother was part of the intifada even though I knew he was innocent. I knew that even if I said this my confession is not enough. They needed a confession from those they accuse."
Now, four years later, Ali's hands still tremble when he recalls the horror of his experience, and yet, in a voice barely above a whisper, he described his torment with an almost clinical dispassion. "Usually the torture began in the afternoon," he said, "for two hours. Then they rest for an hour. Then two hours more." It was not just physical abuse Ali endured, but psychological threats as well.
"They used to tell me that they would bring my mother and sister in and take all her clothes off," he said. "For us, this is the most terrible thing. But they didn't do it."
For a brief moment, Ali said, he saw his father, who was then 70, in one of Basra's prisons. "My father told me they tortured him into saying things against my brother," Ali said. "They used to torture my brother in front of my father. He used to accuse himself of betraying his son. That is why he died. He knew his son was innocent."
When he was released from prison, six months later, Ali pressed his thumbprint on a document handed to him. It read: "I state that I will not talk to any person or group that is against the government or the Baath Party or about anything that happened inside the prison. If I do so, my punishment will result in my execution and that of my family. I agree."
For many of those caught up in the regime of terror, false accusations were common and torture was, it seems, inevitable.
In the case of Jawad Abdul Al Naby, it was an informer who led the police to his door in July 2000. "He filed a report to the Baath Party, saying that I was running to Iran," said Al Naby, like most people in southern Iraq, an adherent to the Shiite branch of Islam.
"When they came," he recounted, "I ran away, but they shot me in the leg." Almost eagerly, Al Naby pulled the hem of his robe up, revealing two pale scars on his thigh, the exit and entry marks of the bullet.
"For six months I was questioned," Al Naby went on. "I had a broken leg and while I lay on the bed they hit me on the face and chin. They broke my front teeth. They kept saying, 'You are going to Iran.' I said, 'No.' For one month they beat me, once in the morning and once in the evening. They said I was going to the border to join the Al Badr brigade," an armed Shiite guerrilla group opposed to the Hussein regime that operates out of Iran.
"I said I don't know anything about Al Badr," he continued. "I said, 'I'm just a smuggler. I smuggle camels and sheep into Kuwait by sea.'"
His protestations were in vain. Al Naby said he was sentenced to 15 years in prison, only to be released last October in a huge national amnesty announced by Hussein, during which many prisons across the country were emptied.
"All the people who beat me," Al Naby said, "they should be executed. The man who informed on me is still here. I want justice."
Shia Terror
In 1998, a white United Nations vehicle pulled up outside the adobe-brick house of Maithan Al Naji. "They came to ask if our food supplies were OK," said Al Naji, a thick-set man with a closely shorn beard, as he sunk down to the thin grass mats on the floor of his tiny sitting room. "They asked whether discrimination against the Shia exists. Discrimination exists. It is something we deal with."
Indeed, although Shiites comprise 60 percent of Iraq's population, Hussein's government, though generally secular, was largely made up of members of the Sunni branch of Islam, a source of deep discontent in southern Iraq.
"Two days later, two members of the Baath Party came here," Al Naji said. "They took me to the Mukharabat in Basra. There they hit me with wooden clubs. They said, 'You knew these people.' They said the United Nations was giving me money. I said no."
After he was released, Al Naji said, in desperation for his family, he joined the Baath Party as a lowest-ranking member, a "moaeen," or supporter. "My name is with the Baath Party," he said, "not my mind."
Many of those who were tortured spoke at length about the glee with which their torturers took to their task, and how if they extracted confessions they were given bonuses. Rasim Al Essa, 35, was picked up at a roadblock on suspicion of having conspired to blow up a convoy of cars; he says he was singled out solely because of his faith by Baath officials eager to scoop up as many suspects as possible.
"They took me because I am a Shia," he said. "They tortured me every day. They used to hang me by the arms from the ceiling. They attached electric wires to my penis. They tortured us again and again to say anything against the Baath Party so they could execute us. A party member got 25,000 dinars," about $8, "to arrest someone and 100,000 dinars," about $33, "to get someone to confess."
"Some people got them to stop the torture by confessing so they could rest freely for a while," he said. "Then they were taken away and executed."
A former police lieutenant, Mohammed Aboud Hamoud, who now wants to return to any new police force, admitted bluntly, "We got a reward for getting a confession."
The central police station here is a stark concrete building, its facade charred and its interior blackened by bomb and fire damage. Outside, a line of men, all freshly shaven, their shirts clean and crisply pressed, waited patiently in the sun. Under the station's portico, a team of British officers sat at salvaged desks interviewing each of the men, former police officers in the Saddam Hussein regime who sought re-employment in what will be a newly constituted police force.
Meek now, in the sun and under the eye of British soldiers with automatic weapons, these are the men that many Iraqis here accuse of committing the atrocities that come to light as each day passes.
In line, in a short-sleeve shirt and creased slacks, 23-year-old Yakthan Abed Al-Hussein, a former police lieutenant, waited with his former colleagues. "I want to help in the security and safety of my country," he said, explaining his presence in the line. "All Iraqis are so happy now. It was a bad regime."
But when pressed on his role in the previous regime, and that of the police with whom he stood, he was quiet for a moment. "We were obliged to do bad things," he said. "If we didn't follow orders, we were tortured too."
Getting Their Ears Cut
Even the city's premier surgeons were enlisted in the task of physically abusing prisoners.
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."
His voice shaking, Al Sabagh insisted he was spared the horror. "I didn't have to do it because they stopped after three days," he said. "But even if it would have cost me my life, I would refuse. I am not a butcher."
Anwar Abdul Al Razaq is one of the butchered.
In the spring of 1994, before summer's anvil of heat fell with finality, Al Razaq was serving as a driver in the 47th Division of the Iraqi army. "I left for half a day for sick leave," he recalled, "without papers. When I came back, there were Baath Party members who grabbed me and said I was a deserter. I said I had been sick and they didn't believe me."
At that time, the Iraqi army, just three years after its defeat at the hands of the American and allied forces after the invasion of Kuwait, was suffering tremendous rates of desertion. Saddam Hussein, intent on crushing the deserters and restoring discipline in the ranks where morale was never high, ordered a roundup of all deserters.
"They arrested me and took me straight to the hospital," Al Razaq said. "They blindfolded me. They gave me some anesthetic, not much. They tied my hands to the bed with ropes. Then they cut my ears off. I was screaming."
Now, with little more than ragged stumps where his ears once were, he is one of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of soldiers who were disfigured, some for desertion, many others for inadvertent errors.
For none was there mercy shown.
"The doctor was apologizing and said he was forced to do it," said Al Razaq. "I believed him. But there were Baath members standing next to him. I moved my blindfold with my shoulder and saw them. It wasn't the doctors' fault. They were forced to do it.
"Now they call us," he said, " 'Abu Thanat Mabtura,' or 'Abu Cut-Off Ears.'"
The Disappeared
It is largely rubble now, Al Laith Al Abiadh, or the White Lion Central Prison. A bomb or shell has punched a hole in the floor, sending a shaft of light into the barred dungeons below, illuminating cells that few have ever seen, but many here have imagined.
A huge crowd assembles at the prison daily to dig, to search for traces of relatives, of friends, who they believe vanished into the maw of Saddam Hussein's apparatus of repression. One of those, Sahd Abdul Wahat, a 30-year-old fisherman, said he was looking for his three brothers who have been missing since 1991.
"After the rebellion in 1991" - the Shiite uprising against Hussein that was encouraged by then-President George Bush, but which was ruthlessly put down when it became clear that the American president had no intention of supporting the rebellion - "they surrounded people in Abu Khasib."
"The army, the Mukharabat and the Baath members, they just picked us up from the house," he said. "They took me for investigation. They used to hit me with sticks. They put electricity on my stomach. They wanted the names of those who were in the rebellion. They were asking about my older brothers.
"I would confess to get them to stop the torture," he said. "I said, 'Just give me a blank piece of paper and I'll sign it and you can write anything you want.'
"Every day I come here and dig with people," he said. "I don't think anyone is alive. We've been digging for a long time."
Among those who dig there is a durable rumor of secret prisons, of tunnels that lead to dungeons where prisoners, missing sons and brothers, may still be alive. They are not alone in their digging, however. For days the British have followed leads, chased rumors and put their back hoes to work in the search for secret prisons.
"We've been over there every day for five days and found nothing," said Capt. Justin Prowse, a member of the Black Watch unit of the British army that was now camped out in the sections of the Mukharabat's vast compound here still standing. "People want some sort of closure. It's easier to believe someone is still alive."
But while their searches have failed to find underground prisons, the British have turned up substantial evidence of torture in the prisons they have examined.
"We've seen lots of evidence of torture," Prowse said. "Some of the cells we found had shackles on the floors, shackles on the ceilings."
Even the wealthy, those with formidable connections to the halls of power in Iraq, were not immune from the ravages of the Iraqi police state. Zuhair H. Jawa Kubba, married to one of the daughters of the wealthiest men in the country, was stopped and searched by the police in 1994 and found with American dollars in his pocket, he said.
"They took me in," said Kubba, now dapper in a corn-yellow polo shirt and tan slacks, "and tied my two legs together with rope and hung me from the ceiling. They beat me with metal rods. A General Mahdi did this to me. He said he was a specialist in kung fu. He said, 'You specialize in dollars and opposition to the government.'" Eventually, he was released. As evidence of his ordeal, he lifts, without hesitation, his pant leg to show the red scars around his ankles from the rope that dangled him in his cell of torture.
After more than a week of interviews here in Basra and in neighboring towns, it is almost impossible to find a family, a house, a block on which there is not a story of torture or death.
"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.
While some speak of the need for redress from the courts and a new legal system, many more speak of revenge, of doing unto their tormentors as was done unto them, a retributive justice wrought from Islam. "Whatever happened to me has to happen to them," said Rasim Al Essa, the man who was picked up as a suspect in an alleged plan to bomb a convoy of cars. "The people in the Baath Party have great wealth. They have to be punished. An eye for an eye."
Last Monday, Nabil Abdul Ali, the man who left his thumbprint on a document barring him from discussing his tortures, went to the Al Jamhoria mosque here in Basra. There, pasted to the wall, outside the prayer hall, was a handwritten list of 147 names of men who had been executed by the Mukharabat after the 1999 intifada.
Twenty lines down, he came across his brother's name: Aziz Abdul Ali. Carefully, his hands shaking, Ali copied down the names of men from his neighborhood in Abu Khasib to tell their families. He left off his brother's.
"I didn't write his down," Ali said, "because it would kill my mother."
Then, with a black ballpoint pen, Ali drew a simple line over his brother's name.
Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc.
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