Horror Stories
Posted April 28, 2003
By Timothy W. Maier
The war footage of Iraq beamed via satellite to billions of TV viewers around the world showed homes with walls invariably decorated with pictures of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. If he was so hated, why so many pictures? There was little choice: Failure to hang such a picture or display a statue, or even to celebrate Saddam's April 28 birthday, guaranteed a one-way ticket to a torture chamber in which execution often was only a matter of time.
"We had a picture of Saddam to show loyalty," explains Bayanne Surdashi, 27, who was granted political asylum in the United States in 1996 along with some 6,400 Kurds who faced certain death under Hussein's ethnic-cleansing campaign. "We hung that picture to trick them because there was a saying in Iraq that if you put your foot down wrong, you're dead."
<font size=5>Death loomed everywhere in Iraq under the Ba'ath Party regime, which killed some 2 million people, both old and young. Its agents removed the mentally ill and the disabled from the care of their families and shot them dead. Saddam's Republican Guards raped women and children and tortured those suspected of being disloyal to Saddam.
Surdashi recalls from her youth that the stench of death was so overpowering in her neighborhood in Iraq that it prevented children from playing outside, as thousands of dead bodies were dumped in the streets and left to decompose.<font size=3> But for years even Iraqis living in the United States refused to talk about such atrocities. "I was afraid of coming forward to share my story with the public," explains Surdashi, who lives in Virginia. "I feared that the Iraqi secret police had agents everywhere in the world. Saddam was successful in instilling fear in all of us. His thirty-some years of torture and tyranny worked all too well."
The Iraqi exiles were not alone in remaining silent. Even the U.S. government refused to declassify Pentagon reports and evidence that was confirmed after the fall of Baghdad. In fact it was more than a decade after Gulf War I ended before the Pentagon declassified its top-secret file on Iraq under the title "Report on Iraqi War Crimes." <font size=5>The report revealed that U.S. soldiers had discovered at least two dozen Iraqi torture chambers in Kuwait City. Most were located in police stations or sports facilities. Not surprisingly, U.S. troops unearthed similar torture chambers in sports facilities and police stations throughout Iraq after the recent military operations.
The summary of the declassified 14-page report on war crimes committed by the Iraqis in Kuwait offers a taste of what Iraqi Ba'athists did wherever they held power. According to the report, "The gruesome evidence confirms torture by amputation of or injury to various body parts, to include limbs, eyes, tongues, ears, noses, lips and genitalia. Electric shock was applied to sensitive parts of the body (nose, mouth, genitalia); electric drills were used to penetrate the chest, legs or arms of victims. Victims were beaten until bones were broken, skulls were crushed and faces disfigured. Some victims were killed in acid baths. Women taken hostage were raped repeatedly. Eyewitnesses described the murder of Kuwaitis by Iraqi military personnel who forced family members to watch. Eyewitnesses reported Iraqis torturing a woman by making her eat her own flesh as it was cut from her body. Other eyewitness accounts describe Iraqi execution of Kuwaiti civilians by dismemberment and beatings while victims were suspended from ceilings and with implements such as axes."<font size=3>
For years, many Iraqis remained in the dark about what happened to lost relatives who were taken to the torture chambers and never returned. Others were kept wondering whether their loved ones were victims of Saddam's chemical warfare. They slowly are beginning to learn the truth with the identification of unmarked mass graves all across Iraq. The discovery brings some peace to Surdashi, who lost three uncles when the Iraqi regime used chemical weapons against the Kurds. Surdashi's mother, who remained in Iraq, finally may get a chance to bury the remains of her brothers. "My mother has been weeping for the last 12 years," the young woman says, wiping back tears. "She wants to find the graves to pay the respect they deserve. She just wants to see justice. Until she finds the graves, she is not going to rest. We don't know what happened to our loved ones. I lost 40 direct relatives and 150 indirect relatives."
Surdashi is like many Iraqis who have been taking up the challenge that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld issued when he urged Iraqis here and abroad to share their stories of the oppressive Ba'ath regime that modeled its political machine on that of the Nazis. Now that the regime has fallen, Iraqis have been talking painfully about the horrors to everyone who will listen.
<font size=5>Their stories are not new revelations. For years groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have compiled detailed, firsthand accounts of such abuse with photographs too graphic to print, including pictures of mutilated children tortured to death. But their reports tended to be ignored or reduced to a few inches in the back pages of metropolitan newspapers. Even when the evidence was overwhelming, reporters and editors looked the other way.
Certainly that was the case with CNN. The cable-news network that bills itself as the "most trustworthy" in the world has had to acknowledge that it deliberately withheld information that confirmed torture chambers. The reason? Network executives claim they were scared to tell the truth because they didn't want to endanger lives. Critics point out that CNN gave no warning even when it had advance notice of murders planned by the regime, strongly suggesting that it followed the Saddam line to retain access to Baghdad.
What a difference two weeks of war made. CNN and other media outlets now are starting to report the heartbreaking stories of Saddam's chambers of horror. Every new confirmation of systematic murder and torture begs the question of why the international community remained silent about all of this, doing its best to prevent the United States from acting earlier to stop it.
Even a cursory look inside the torture chambers of one of the police stations elicits horror.<font size=3>
When embedded U.S. reporters stumbled on one of these in An Nasiriya, the cameras finally rolled as two Iraqis who narrowly had escaped death there demonstrated for U.S. Marines how friends and members of their family were tortured. One illustrated by pretending to shock another with electrical current. The small police station was in a one-story building that also housed a wooden stockade, a primitive room with an electric chair and countless photos of burned bodies and tons of surveillance equipment. Capt. Pete McAleer, commander of Echo Company of the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit whose patrol discovered the room of horrors, told reporters,<font size=5> "It looks a bit too much like Nazi Germany to me." As one Iraqi described these terror chambers, "It was a place of evil."
That may be an understatement considering the torture methods that ranged from ripping out fingernails to taking a saw and cutting off a penis or breast, or playing dominoes on the backs of women who had been systematically raped [see sidebar below]. Their memories of torture and death make it hard for Iraqis to understand the war protesters in the West. "Why weren't they protesting when 350,000 Iraqis were chemically and biologically attacked?" asks Surdashi. "Where is the outrage? Why weren't they on the streets then? We know the price of freedom is going to be high, but two million of my people died under the Gestapo tactics of Saddam."<font size=3>
Consider the story of Uzair Jaff, who survived the chemical attack at Anfal in April 1988, narrowly escaping from a harrowing experience reminiscent of Nazi Germany. Jaff recently testified in broken English before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus on Capitol Hill. <font size=5>He recalled when Saddam's cousin, Gen. Ali Hassan al-Majid - better known as "Chemical Ali" - arrived in his village outside of Kirkuk demanding to know which villagers were Iraqi and which were Kurds. They were separated into groups, with infants being snatched from their mothers. A few days later, Saddam's guards rousted them in the early morning, calling as many as 300 names. Those including Jaff were driven toward the western border of Iraq, stopping at the police station to switch guards. The new guards carried shovels later used to dig ditches to bury prisoners they executed along the route. There was little water; guards forced the prisoners to drink their own urine. When the guards came to the truck in which Jaff was sitting they didn't even bother to force their victims to get out, but opened fire into the truck.<font size=3>
Jaff and one other villager survived the shooting by pretending to be dead as the guards dumped the bodies into the ditches. That night Jaff stripped off his clothes so he would not be recognized by Saddam's troops and walked approximately nine hours until he reached a refugee camp. Terrified that his family might face execution if it were known that he had cheated death, Jaff kept silent about his ordeal and never sent word that he survived.
<font size=5>Like the Nazis who committed similar atrocities, Saddam's regime meticulously recorded its crimes and tormented families of victims with reminders that it could happen to them. Everything appears to have been documented. The torture, the deaths and the methods of killing were kept in secret intelligence dossiers that now have fallen into the hands of the U.S. military. Some 18 tons of Iraqi secret-police and intelligence files consisting of 5 million pages were seized by Kurdish rebels and turned over to the United States. The documents "provide a thorough overview of how the Iraqi police state maintained its grip on power," says Joost Hiltermann, who supervised the initial review of such records for Human Rights Watch. "They did include some smoking-gun documents showing Iraqi-government culpability for a great number of atrocities."<font size=3>
The Iraqi regime claimed documents of this kind that were obtained by Kurdish rebels were forged but, considering the enormous volume and attention to detail, experts call it preposterous. <font size=5>The records found in these chambers of horror range from identification cards to photographs of victims including small, badly burned children. A single document dated August 1989 lists the names of 87 people who were executed and a summary of each case. The alleged crimes included trespassing into forbidden zones and teaching the Kurdish language. A record from March 1991 provides instructions from Baghdad Security Headquarters, declaring, "Shoot at demonstrators with the aim of killing 95 percent of them and saving the rest for interrogation." Another of the captured documents directs that a chemical-weapons unit be kept in reserve. Other orders called for executing wounded civilians and razing Kurdish neighborhoods with tanks, bulldozers and shovels.<font size=3>
Why did Iraqis not liberate themselves from so vicious a tyranny without U.S. help? "We tried," Surdashi says, noting they even attempted to use suicide bombers but could never get close enough to Saddam Hussein. "How could we liberate ourselves when Saddam had all the weapons?" <font size=5>Sobbing, she told of a member of the Republican Guards who "put a gun in the mouth of a baby - and shot the baby!"<font size=3>
Another Iraqi, Fatima Faraj, 57, bursts into tears as she describes how her nephews were seized at college by Saddam's agents and sent to prison. Why were they taken? "Because they were Kurds," says Faraj, who left Iraq in 1996 and now lives in Virginia. After nearly two years in captivity, the two nephews, Mahamood, 25, and Ahmad, 28, were killed on Jan. 1, 1988. The Republican Guards demanded that their father pay a fee to Saddam for the cost of executing his children. When he demanded a receipt, the guards balked and eventually turned over the remains.
<font size=5>The father brought the bodies of his sons home in boxes and instructed Faraj not to open them. She did anyway. "The entire bodies - other than their underwear - were places of burn," Faraj sobs. "There were two black spots on their necks. They looked as though they were whipped and kicked throughout their bodies." They could not have a proper funeral because the regime frequently poisoned the food or gassed Kurdish funerals. They couldn't take that chance.
The torture didn't end for Faraj. Another nephew, Muhammad, 34, finally was released from a torture chamber. "He was kicked so bad," she says tearfully. "They took out all his fingernails and toenails. His fingers and feet were all pink. He had a nervous breakdown."
The stories of other friends who were tortured spread throughout Iraq. "One person was so thirsty," Faraj says, "that they fed him his urine. Others had weird skin diseases; some were fed poison."
The unspeakable was commonplace, says Yasmine Baban, who now lives in the Washington metropolitan area. She says children would walk to school and see their neighbors hanging from nooses. "One engineer on our street was executed, one doctor in another home was arrested while his wife was pregnant, accused of being a member of the Free Masons. Another neighbor who was Jewish, her 18-year-old brother was arrested, and then she was asked to come and collect him from the prison many months later. When she went she found him dead, along with many other dead bodies in a room. She took him and had to have a quiet burial and no funeral because it was not permitted." No one could talk about it, she says. "There were new laws every other day, and people were afraid to speak or even to talk on the phone, afraid to express a thought that might get them in trouble or be contrary to what the Ba'ath Party believes in."<font size=3>
The terrible silence that had fallen over Iraq ended when Baghdad was liberated by coalition forces. "Living in Iraq was a chamber of tortures," says Raz Rasool, who currently lives in Virginia and was invited to the White House to speak with President George W. Bush about human-rights abuses. <font size=5>Her cousin was tortured in an Iraqi prison, and at age 12 she personally witnessed the cruel beating of children who refused to celebrate Saddam Hussein's birthday.<font size=3> They were taught to treat Saddam as a second father and to refer to him as "Papa Saddam." But some of the teens dared to express opposition.
"When we refused to join the rally for Saddam, a military officer gathered us in the school yard," Rasool recalled. "He grabbed a 17-year-old girl by her hair and began pulling it out. When she fell to the ground he began kicking her. He was beating her in front of us" as he ordered the children to celebrate, and then threatened them if they didn't. "I will hang you in the school yard. I don't want education, I want loyalists," he told them.
The officer wasn't bluffing. "They had shot three people in front of the school," Rasool recalls. "The abuse was daily. Either they would take you away with a reason or with no reason. <font size=5>They would kill children and then change the birth certificate so they could record their age as 18. Bodies were found burned, with black lines around the neck, showing they were killed while being tortured."
Eyewitnesses said Saddam's agents would take pictures of the dead and use the photos to intimidate others or torture family members. "I remember a picture of a naked woman on a table where the officers were playing a game of cards over her body," she says tearfully. "They sent the picture to the family to humiliate them."
How did Saddam get his officers to commit such acts? "They got promoted for it," Rasool says. "Saddam loved those pictures."<font size=3>
On April 4, Rasool shared her experiences with Bush, as did several others. "You felt the humanity and passion inside of him," she reports. "He said he was going to help us, to free us. I wanted him to know that we owe our gratitude to you, Mr. President. Our people have suffered under this genocide regime of Saddam. <font size=5>In 35 years, there had been not one demonstration [against these atrocities] among Arab countries and no one was willing to help the Iraqi people. President Bush said he would remove Saddam and he did. He is a hero."
Both Surdashi and Faraj also praise Bush for having the courage to help their country. The two women, who will become U.S. citizens in November along with 6,400 other Kurds who sought refuge here, say the president will get their votes come election time, too. "We want to thank President Bush for our people," Surdashi says. "He liberated Iraq!" proclaims Faraj. "He has saved countless generations."
Prior to the fall of Baghdad "we couldn't even cry in our homeland," Rasool says. "But now we have cried on the shoulder of a new friend. Not only are we saved, but a whole generation of my children and grandchildren will be saved, too. We have a saying: 'We have no friends but mountains.' But now we have a friend and it means a lot."
The saying comes from the fact that Iraq's Arab neighbors did not stand up against Hussein, Sursdashi says. "Our Arab neighbors did nothing, but sat back. We are grateful for what the United States did with allied support." When that statue came down, she continues, "I was so overwhelmed with feelings I was crying. The joy in the street was sincere. The Iraqi people knew nothing about democracy or freedom, but now they know what it is to become free - free of torture - and the fall of tyranny."
Breaking into tears, Rasool adds, "I feel like I am being reborn. When I saw that monument falling down. ... I'm sorry for crying but I never felt like a human being before. Today we are human beings."
<font size=10>Read the sidebar, "Gruesome Methods of Saddam's Madness."<font size=3>
Timothy W. Maier is a writer for Insight.
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