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Nagem
Salam interviewed a former Abu Ghraib female detainee who was
arrested by US forces on September 14, 2003 and detained in
Ba'qouba, Tikrit, Abu Ghraib and the Tesfirat transfer
station.
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| 2 US soldiers in front of a pile of Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib. |
“I’m
afraid to give my real name,” she said to begin the interview.
After being detained in her hometown of Ba’qubah on September
14, 2003 and held in three detention facilities for four months,
she preferred to be called Umm Taha.
“The
American’s picked me up for nothing, so what’s stopping them
from doing it again?”
A
highly educated woman with four children, she had worked for the
Iraqi government as a legal investigator. While sitting in her
home on September 14 of last year, she received a phone call
from an interpreter for the coalition forces who asked her to
meet some US soldiers at the governorate building.
“He
told me they just needed to verify something and that it would
only take five minutes,” she said with disbelief, “but when
I arrived there the Americans tied my hands and held guns to my
head.”
Like
most Iraqis who have been detained by the US-led coalition
forces, Umm Taha was not charged with any crime, nor given a
reason for her capture. When she asked why she was being
detained, a soldier told her, “We’re taking you to Ibel
Fanas Airport and we’ll tell you there,” she said. She was
then roughly loaded into a military vehicle and driven to the
holding facility.
Once
there, she was frisked by a female soldier in front of several
men, which is grossly disrespectful of her culture and Islamic
religious beliefs. “After this, they yelled at me, pushed me
around, put me in an old bathroom, threw me a blanket and closed
the door.”
The
bathroom had four clogged toilets and it was infested with
insects, and extremely hot and dirty. “They kept me in there
for 22 days and the only time I was allowed outside was to use
the toilet since none of them in my cell worked.” When she was
taken out to relieve herself, she was forced to do so in front
of male detainees. “It was a disgrace,” she said while
looking at the ground.
Aside
from humiliating “bathroom” breaks, and getting fluid
infusions in the clinic and being forced to clean the mainstream
detainee toilets in front of the men, she spent 22 days in
solitary confinement in a small room with four grungy, clogged
toilets.
“I
slept on the ground,” she exclaimed. “It was very dirty,
very hot and had a horrible stench. I was nauseated and vomiting
most of the time.”
Her
mistreatment didn’t end there. While she was given food and
water, the food was military MREs, the water was taken from a
barrel outside and thus was extremely hot. Due to her
deteriorating physical condition, she had to be given several
bags of fluids with a dirty IV.
Due
to physical nausea coupled with a deep anxiety for her two small
children left unattended at home, Umm Taha wasn’t able to eat,
and grew weaker by the day. “My 12-year-old son and
14-year-old daughter were alone,” she cried while explaining
her desperate situation, “and I had no idea what would become
of them.”
Around
3-4 days after here initial detainment, she was interrogated by
an MP who referred to himself as “The Scorpion,” along with
a Lebanese translator named Ija.
“They
asked me so many questions,” she explained: “Am I Sunni or
Shiite? Am I a Ba’thist? What is my name?” Finally, “The
Scorpion” accused her of assisting high-ranking Ba’thists by
allowing some of them to hold meetings in her home.
“I’m
not even a Ba’thist,” she said while holding her arms in the
air, “I told them I had papers in my purse that proved that I
am not in the party and that Saddam killed one of my relatives,
but they didn’t care.”
Umm
Taha claimed that the documents the US soldiers refused to look
at proved that she had spent 3 months and 10 days in jail
because of Saddam Hussein.
Whether
Umm Taha was guilty of her charges or not, this does not detract
from the fact that the treatment both she and other detainees
received at the hands of US soldiers throughout her detention
was illegal, immoral and inhumane.
On
the fifth day of her detention, several of the US soldiers who
transported her to the holding facility were killed in an
attack. She was interrogated harshly, verbally, and she was
psychologically abused by three men and accused of planning the
attack.
To this, she grew very angry and frustrated, and yelled at them, “This is your democracy?” |
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Her
11th day of detention at the airport brought another
interrogation. “They asked me if I knew General Mahmoud and I
told them that is the name of half of the generals in Iraq,”
she stated firmly. She continued to answer their questions until
one of the soldiers threatened her family and threatened to send
her to Guantanamo.
To
this, she grew very angry and frustrated, and yelled at them,
“This is your democracy?”
On
the 23rd day, Umm Taha was transferred to a detention facility
in Tikrit. “They roughly loaded several of us into a truck
with a canopy,” she explained. “Then when we arrived, they
made us sit there for 3 hours in the extreme heat before
unloading us. Inside, they made me kneel on the ground against a
wall with my hands on my head for nearly an hour while yelling
‘Don’t Move!’ over and over in my ear.”
She
grew angry and told of male detainees who had their faces
scraped across the floor by American soldiers. When she was
finally allowed to move away from the wall, her hands and feet
were shackled, which is how they would remain for her 11 days
there.
Umm
Taha was kept in a tent surrounded by razor wire with another
woman and 10 children between the ages of 10 and 14 years.
Her
humiliating treatment at the hands of the American soldiers
continued in Tikrit. She was forced to use a sieve to separate
feces from urine in a latrine waste bucket. “A soldier made me
carry the heavy bucket of feces 100 meters, then he poured
benzene on it, lit it on fire, and made me stir it for half an
hour,” she exclaimed in disbelief.
“I
pleaded with them because I was still sick,” she said quietly
while crying, “I told them I couldn’t do this, but they made
me do it anyway.” Afterwards she was given 5 bags of IV fluids
until she somewhat recovered, but her paramedic was not allowed
by the soldiers to have her shackles removed during her
treatment.
The
soldier who had refused the removal of her irons told her, “If
your little finger touches a soldier, I will consider it an
attack on the coalition forces.”
Umm
Taha tells of what she saw during her stay in Tikrit: soldiers
putting their boots on detainees’ heads, Iraqis being loaded
into civilian cars with Kuwaiti license plates and driven from
the prison, and daily humiliating treatment of the general
population of the detainees at the hands of the occupying
soldiers.
On
October 15th, she was transferred to the notorious Abu Ghraib
prison, without being told why, and held for three months. She
was locked in a cell on the second floor of a building and not
allowed to leave it aside from 8 days in the clinic for more
treatment due to her deteriorating health.
Her
stay at Abu Ghraib would find her witnessing the most horrendous
events she’d ever seen, but not before she suffered more
humiliating treatment from US soldiers.
“There
was a black American soldier named Joyner who refused to take me
to the clinic when I was so sick,” she said, her anger
palpable, “but some Iraqi social workers finally took me
there.”
According
to Umm Taha, Joyner came every morning to beat on the cell bars
with a metal rod at 4 a.m., and forced all of the prisoners to
yell, “Good morning sir!”
“We
were never allowed to sleep through a night,” she exclaimed
sadly. “He would come at 2, 3 and 4 a.m., and beat on the bars
every time. I was always so exhausted.”
She
told of a woman who was brought in named Afaf Said, who had a
black eye and bloody lips. “She was married to a relative of
Saddam, and was brought in with her teenage son,” explained
Umm Taha, “She told me she was put in a wooden cage and
beaten.”
Across
from Umm Taha’s cell was a room that the soldiers called,
“The Shower.” Periodically detainees were brought in, placed
on the ground, and had bags of ice dumped on them. “The next
morning they were either dragged or carried out by soldiers to
be taken to the clinic,” she explained.
From
the time of her initial detention until she was released, she
was never allowed a shower or a change of clothes.
During
November, Umm Taha says, many of the detainees in Abu Ghraib
rioted against their mistreatment. As a result, 14 Iraqi men
were stripped naked and sacks were placed over their heads by US
soldiers, and brought into the corridor beneath Umm Taha’s
cell. Thus, she had a clear view of the atrocities that ensued.
“The
soldiers made them all stand on one leg, then they kicked them
to make them fall to the ground,” says Umm Taha.
“I can still remember their screaming.” |
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She
watched Lynndie England, the female American soldier made
infamous in the widespread incriminating photos, dance around
laughing while using a rubber glove to snap the detainees on
their genitals. “The soldiers also made all the men lay on the
ground, face down, spread their legs, then men and women
soldiers alike kicked the detainees between their legs,” she
said quietly.
After
pausing, she added, “I can still remember their screaming.”
She
said that, in addition to this, the detainees were ordered to
crawl around the corridor on all fours and make cow and sheep
noises as the American soldiers laughed at them.
Umm
Taha told of other humiliating and degrading events she
witnessed. Detainees would hold their Qur’an out of their cell
bars in order to have some light to read with, “And when they
did this,” she said, “soldiers would hit them on their
arms.”
“I spent 20 years building my life, and now I’m 50 years old; I can’t start over again.” |
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She
claims that the soldiers distributed bibles written in Arabic to
the teenagers being held in Abu Ghraib, of which there were at
least 20 in her building.
“Everyday,
morning and evening, I saw people tortured and humiliated in the
corridor in front of my cell,” she cries.
While
she was transferred out of Abu Ghraib on November 11th, she
ended up spending two months at the Tesfirat transfer station
near the Olympic stadium in Baghdad.
Upon
here release on January 10, 2004, she was left with nothing as
she walked onto the streets of Baghdad with no money and wearing
the same clothing she was initially detained in. She was lucky
enough to find a taxi, which drove her to Ba’qubah, where some
friends paid him for the ride.
“I
found out that while my two children who were living with me had
been cared for by relatives in a nearby village, the news of my
two older children crushed me,” she said sadly.
Her
20-year-old son had joined a gang and sold her home after it had
been completely looted, while her 21-year-old daughter had
married a thief.
“My
life is shattered,” Umm Taha said while crying once again,
“and I can do nothing. There is no compensation.”
“I
spent 20 years building my life, and now I’m 50 years old,”
she added, “I can’t start over again.”
She
was simultaneously saddened and angered by both her experience
and what is happening in her country today. “We have no
present. We have no future,” she said, “The occupiers have
destroyed our life, and what have we done?”
“We
want to leave here—leave our country to the people who
‘liberated’ it,” she added.
After
pondering for a moment, before standing to leave the room, she
said, “I am like a tree which has been uprooted. I have no
roots anymore.”
Nagem Salam is an American journalist of Lebanese descent who has worked in Iraq for a total of four months since the Anglo-American invasion of spring 2003. His articles focus on Iraqis and how the occupation of their country affects their daily life.
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