by Robert Fisk
The new Iraqi prison guards at Abu Ghraib, we were informed, had been trained in human rights—including two, it turned out, who had been police officers under the Saddam regime. No wonder General Karpinski said that the Americans hadn’t chosen the doctors—that had been the work of the new Iraqi Ministry of Health. There were U.S. intelligence officers in Abu Ghraib but no, the military police were not present during interrogations. Yes, General Karpinski had visited Guantánamo Bay for “a few days,” but she had not brought any lessons learned there to Baghdad.208
Of course, we were taken on a statutory visit to Abu Ghraib’s old death chamber, the double hanging room in which poor Farzad Bazoft of The Observer and thousands of Iraqis were put to death. General Karpinski gave the lever a tug and the great iron trapdoors clanged open, their echo vibrating through the walls. Dr. Majid said he had never heard them before, that he was never even a member of the Baath party. So let this be written in history: the chief medical officer at Saddam’s nastiest prison—who was now the chief medical officer at America’s cleanest Iraqi prison—was never a member of the Baath party and never saw an execution.
Of course, there are things which only a heart of stone cannot be moved by, the last words written and carved on the walls of the filthy death row cells, just a few yards from the gallows. “Ahmed Qambal, 8/9/2000,” “Ahmed Aziz from Al-Najaf governorate, with Jabah, 2/9/01,” “Abbad Abu Mohamed.” Sometimes they had added verses from the Koran. “Death is better than shame.” “Death is life for a believer and a high honour.” What courage it must have taken to write such words, their very last on Earth.
But there was something just a little too neat about all this. Against Saddam’s cruelty, any institution looks squeaky clean. Yet there was a lot about Abu Ghraib which didn’t look as clean as the new kitchens. There was still no clear judicial process for the supposed killers, thieves and looters behind the razor wire. The military admitted that the transcription of Arabic names—with all the Ellis Island mistakes that can lead to—meant that families often could not find their loved ones. There was no mention—until we brought it up—of the guerrilla mortar attack that killed six prisoners in their tents. The Americans had sent psychologists to talk to the inmates afterwards and found that they believed—surprise, surprise—that the Americans were using them as human shields. And, as we know, much, much worse was to come.
OWEID POINTS ACROSS the dry earth and sweeps his hand across the grey desolation of sand, dust and broken homes to the north. “I knew all these villages,” he says. “Take this down in your notebook—you should remember the names of these dead villages: Mahamar, Manzan, Meshal, Daoudi, Djezeran Nakbia, Zalal, Abu Talfa, Jdedah, Ghalivah, Um al-Hamadi, Al-Gufas, Al-Khor, Al-Hammseen . . .” It is too much. I cannot keep up with Abbas Oweid. The sheer scope of Saddam’s destruction of the Marsh Arabs has outpaced the speed of my handwriting. But then, far across the rubble of bricks and broken doorframes and dried mud, there comes the cry of a bird.
Oweid’s face breaks into a smile. “Where the birds are, there is the water,” he says, and rests on his heels, a man—the Arabs like this—who has found the right aphorism for the right moment. But it is true. The birds are returning because the water is trickling back into the thousands of square miles that Saddam drained for ten long years. You can literally hear it, gurgling, frothing, sucking its way into old ditches and dried-up streams and round the low dirt hills upon which the Shia Muslim Marsh Arabs built their homes before Saddam decided to destroy them. This is the same estuary where my friend and colleague Mohamed Salam of AP saw the charred corpses of the Marsh Arabs twenty years ago, burned and electrocuted by Saddam’s army, people who’d lived among ducks and buffaloes and fished with spears, gutted open like fish, where the innocent had to die along with the invader.
I sit on a little boat, puttering up the broad Salal River, and see an old mud and concrete house with a new roof and new palm trees planted around it and a small, green-painted boat pulled onto the dirt embankment. The bulrushes and reeds are gone and there is no tree higher than 3 feet. But one family has come back. Even Mohsen Bahedh, whose family fled to the safety of Iran during the long and terrible man-made drought that Saddam inflicted on his people, is thinking of returning.
He sat beside me in our boat, his left hand holding a Kalashnikov rifle, his right resting on the head of his five-year-old son, Mehdi. “There were 12,000 families here and they all left,” he said. “We had fish and fruit and vegetables and birds and water buffalo and our homes, and Saddam dried us out, took all our water away, left us with nothing.”
Our boat slowed at one point because the water level rose 6 inches in front of us, a literal ridge of higher water that fell back to the river’s normal level on the other side. “Underneath us are the remains of a Saddam dam,” Mohsen said. “It makes the water run over the top of it. So we can still see the dams, even when they are no longer here.”
You have to come here to appreciate Saddam’s ruthlessness of purpose. After the Americans and British encouraged the Shia Muslims of Iraq to rise up against Saddam in 1991—and, of course, betrayed them by doing nothing when he wiped out his opponents—deserting Iraqi soldiers and rebels who wanted to keep on fighting retreated into the swamps of Howeiza and Amara and Hamar where the Marsh Arabs, immortalised in Wilfrid Thesiger’s great work so many decades ago, gave them sanctuary. Iraqi helicopters and tanks could not winkle them out. So Saddam embarked on a strategy of counter-guerrilla warfare that puts Israel’s political assassinations and property destruction—and America’s Vietnam Agent Orange—into the shade. He constructed his set of dams—hundreds of them—to block the waters flowing into the marshes from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. He diverted the water through new and wide canals—one of them was called the Mother of All Battles River—which irrigated the towns and cities that remained loyal to him. The only water allowed into the marshes was from the runoffs of fertilised fields, so the Marsh Arabs’ cattle walked into the centre of the streams to find fresh water. In the end, there was almost no water left.
But when the Anglo–American invasion force crashed into Iraq in March 2003 there were still some hundreds of square miles of marshes left; and in the first hours after the British reached Basra, the people of Hamar dug through the earth and concrete dams that Saddam had erected to destroy them and breached his ramparts. One old man in Nasiriyah told me his wife woke him after the first night of bombing to tell him she could hear water trickling in the old ditch behind their house. The man didn’t believe her. “Then I got up and walked outside in the moonlight,” he said. “And I saw water.”
It is a story of hope. Faisal Khayoun’s father was murdered by Saddam’s secret police in 1993 while driving on the Basra Road. “They shot him in the forehead and neck,” he said. “My cousin and my uncle were arrested in 1997 and hanged at Abu Ghraib. The mukhabarat used to come here on raids at four in the morning and I would always spend the nights on the roof, waiting in case they came. Now, for the first time in my life, I stay asleep in my home until the sun wakes me in the morning.”
Mohsen Bahedh jumped ashore 4 miles north of the Hamar Bridge and we sloshed together through deep, black mud that pulled at our shoes, to the four broken walls of a house. “This was my home,” he said. “I came back and knocked some of the bricks and window-frames out to build a new home south of Saddam’s dam. See, that’s where we kept the geese—and my cattle were where the dust is. And my boat was down there.” He and Mehdi paddled through the wreckage. “Maybe we will come back now,” he said. “Yes, we helped Saddam’s opponents. And when the soldiers deserted and came here, we fed them and gave them places to sleep and fuel to keep them warm. We are a kind people.”
Mohsen is forty-eight, but has two young wives and five children and says he can scarcely afford to finish building his new house. And the Marsh Arabs cannot just walk back to their land. Many long ago exchanged the water buffalo for a Mercedes and became traders. Other tribes moved in
to the area and planted crops in newly irrigated land. But Thesiger’s people survived and Saddam’s regime did not, and a small tide of dark blue water was now seeping back into the desert, creeping around Mahamar, Manzan, Meshal and all the lost villages of the marshes.
How hope and horror nestled against each other. As the Americans slaughtered a wedding party in an air strike—and called the guests “insurgents”—another of Saddam’s mass graves would be opened. No sooner had I returned from the land of the Marsh Arabs than I would learn of the “Documentation Centre for the Female Martyrs of the Islamic Movement,” whose study of Saddam’s young female victims—most were subjected to vicious torture and deliberately cruel executions—is not for the faint-hearted.
Wives were forced to watch their husbands hanged before being placed in the electric chair, were burned with acid, tied naked to ceiling fans, sexually abused. In several cases, women were poisoned or used as guinea pigs for chemical substances at a plant near Samara believed to be making chemical weapons. Their names—along with the names of their torturers and executioners—are at last known. One man, Abu Widad, once boasted that he had hanged seventy female prisoners in one night at the Abu Ghraib prison. In many cases, women were put to death for the crime of being the sisters or wives of a wanted man. Most were associated with the forbidden Dawa party whose members were routinely tortured and killed by the Baathist government.
A typical entry in “Imprisoned Memories: Red Pages from a Forgotten History”—compiled by Ali al-Iraq in the Iranian city of Qum—reads as follows:
Samira Awdah al-Mansouri (Um Iman), birthdate 1951, Basra, teacher at Haritha Intermediate School . . . married to the martyr Abdul Ameer, a cadre of the Islamic movement military wing . . . member of Islamic Dawa party . . . Torturers: Major Mehdi al-Dulaymi who tortured while drunk, Lieutenant Hussain al-Tikriti, who specialised in breaking the rib cages of his victims by stamping on them . . . Lieutenant Ibrahim al-Lamee who beat victims on their feet . . . Um Iman was beaten . . . hung by her hair from a ceiling fan and suffered torture by electricity. Having spent two months in the prison cells in Basra without giving way, al-Dulaymi recommended she be executed for carrying unlicensed arms and belonging to the al-Dawa party.
In fact, Um Iman was transferred to the Public Security Division in Baghdad, where further torture took place over eleven months. She subsequently appeared before the Revolutionary Military Security Court, which sentenced her to death by hanging. She spent another six months in the Rashid prison west of Baghdad until—when she might have hoped that her life would be spared—she was, on a Sunday evening, transferred to Abu Ghraib and executed by Abu Widad.
There are frequent accounts of women and children tortured in front of their husbands and fathers. In 1982, for instance, a Lieutenant Kareem in Basra reportedly brought the wife of an insurgent to the prison, stripped and tortured her in front of her husband, then threatened to kill their infant child. When both refused to talk, the security man “threw the baby against the wall and killed him.”
Ahlam al-Ayashi was arrested in 1982 at the age of twenty because she was married to Imad al-Kirawee, a senior Dawa member. When he refused to give information to the security police, two professional torturers—named in the report as Fadil Hamidi al-Zarakani and Faysal al-Hilali—attacked Ahlam in front of the prisoner and his child, torturing her—the account spares readers the details—to death. Her body was buried in the desert outside Basra and has no known grave. Three of Ahlam’s five brothers were executed along with her husband, and another brother was killed in the insurrection that followed the liberation of Kuwait in 1991. But her child Ala, who witnessed her mother’s torture, was taken to Iran, where she married and was now about to enter university.
Many of the stories are painfully tragic. Twenty-one-year-old Awatif Nour al-Hamadani, for example, was betrayed by her own husband, who—under extreme torture—named his wife and several colleagues as gun-runners. Awatif was pregnant but was set on by a man called Major Amer who beat her with a metal chair and then sexually abused her. At her trial, Judge Mussalam al-Jabouri—who was later to try Saddam’s nuclear physicist, Hussain Shahristani—suggested that “a miniature gallows should be found for her baby daughter because she had sucked on her mother’s hate-filled milk.”
Awatif was first taken to be executed with two female colleagues and forced to watch the hanging of 150 men, 10 at a time; as their corpses were taken away, she recognised one of them as her husband. She was then returned to her cell. She was later executed in an electric chair. Many inmates were also killed in the same chair at Abu Ghraib, including two other women, Fadilah al-Haddad in 1982 and Rida al-Ouwaynati the following year.
Maysoon al-Assadi was an eighteen-year-old university student when she was arrested for membership in a banned Islamic organisation. During her interrogation she was hanged by her hair and beaten on the soles of her feet, and then she was sentenced to hang by Judge Awad Mohamed Amin al-Bandar. Her last wish—to say goodbye to her fiancé—was granted and the two married in the prison. But while saying goodbye to other prisoners, she made speeches condemning the leadership of the Iraqi regime and the prison governor decided that she should be put to death slowly. She was strapped into the jail’s electric chair and took two hours to die.
Salwa al-Bahrani, the mother of a small boy, had been caught distributing weapons to Islamic fighters in 1980. She was allegedly administered poisoned yoghurt during interrogation by a Dr. Fahid al-Dannouk, who experimented in poisons that could be used against Iranian troops. Hundreds of mujahedin fighters of Dawa were, according to the report, used as guinea pigs for experiments with toxic chemicals at Salman Pak just south of Baghdad. Salwa died at home forty-five days after being forced to eat the yoghurt. Fatimah al-Hussaini, aged twenty, was accused of concealing weapons for al-Dawa and arrested in Baghdad in 1982. She was beaten with plastic cables, hung from the ceiling by her hands, which were tied behind her back, tortured with electricity and had acid poured on her thighs. She refused to talk and her torturer recommended execution. She was hanged at Abu Ghraib in 1982 and buried by her family in Najaf.
The 550-page report which records the dreadful suffering of Saddam’s female Shiite prisoners was no literary work. Some of its prose is florid and occasionally appears to describe women’s martyrdom as a fate to be emulated. Nor was this a volume that would make easy reading for Americans anxious to use it as evidence against Saddam. At the time these crimes were being committed, the United States regarded Saddam as an ally—and the book repeatedly stated that the chemicals used on women prisoners were originally purchased from Western countries. But the detail is compelling—the names and fates of at least fifty women are recorded, along with the names of their torturers—and the activities of the “Monster of Abu Ghraib,” Abu Widad, have been confirmed by the few prisoners who survived the jail. He carried out executions between 8 p.m. and 4 a.m. and would hit condemned men and women on the back of the head with a hatchet if they praised a murdered imam before they were hanged. In the end, forty-one-year-old Abu Widad was caught after accepting a bribe to put a reprieved prisoner to death instead of the condemned man; he was hanged on his own gallows in 1985.
The Americans and British benefitted from these accounts of terror under Saddam. Would you rather he was still here in Iraq, torturing and gassing his own people? they would ask. Don’t you think we did a good thing by getting rid of him? All this because the original reasons for the invasion—Saddam’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, his links with the outrages of September 11th, Blair’s 45-minute warning—turned out to be lies. But it was a dark comparison that Bush and Blair were making. If Saddam’s immorality and wickedness had to be the yardstick against which all of our own iniquities were judged, what did that say about us? If Saddam’s regime was to be the moral compass to define our actions, how bad—how iniquitous—did that allow us to be? Saddam tortured and executed women in Abu Ghraib. We only sexually abused prisoners and killed a fe
w of them and murdered some suspects in Bagram and subjected them to inhuman treatment in Guantánamo.209 Saddam was much worse. And thus it became inevitable that the symbol of Saddam’s shame—the prison at Abu Ghraib—subsequently became the symbol of our shame too.
What was interesting was the vastly different reaction in East and West to our abuses at Abu Ghraib. We “civilised” Westerners were shocked at the dog-biting and humiliations and torture “our” men and women administered to the inmates. Iraqis were outraged, but not shocked. Their friends and relatives—some of whom had been locked up by the Americans—had long ago told them of the revolting behaviour of the American guards. They weren’t surprised by those iconic photographs. They already knew.
By early 2004, an army of thousands of mercenaries had appeared on the streets of Iraq’s major cities, many of them former British and American soldiers hired by the occupying Anglo-American authorities and by dozens of companies who feared for the lives of their employees in Baghdad. The heavily armed Britons working for well over 300 security firms in Iraq now outnumbered Britain’s 8,000-strong army in the south of the country. Although major U.S. and British security companies were operating in Iraq, dozens of small firms also set up shop with little vetting of their employees and few rules of engagement. Many of the Britons were former SAS soldiers—hundreds of former American Special Forces men were also in the country—while armed South Africans were also working for the occupation authorities.
The presence in Iraq of so many thousands of Western mercenaries—or “security contractors,” as the American press coyly referred to them—said as much about America’s fear of taking military casualties as it did about the multi-million-pound security industry now milking the coffers of the U.S. and British governments. Security firms were escorting convoys on the highways of Iraq. Armed plain-clothes men from an American company were guarding U.S. troops at night inside the former presidential palace where Paul Bremer had his headquarters. In other words, security companies were now guarding occupation troops. When a U.S. helicopter crashed near Fallujah in 2003, it was an American security firm that took control of the area and began rescue operations. Needless to say, casualties among the mercenaries were not included in the regular body count put out by the occupation authorities.
