Torture cells that kept a people in fear

THEY called it the Black Hole, for it was the room from which no prisoner ever emerged alive. The walls and ceiling were coated with treacly black paint and there were no windows so it was impossible to tell night from day.

The floor was several inches deep in charred remains and faeces, and there was the scuffling sound of something rat-sized in the dark. Whatever had happened in there was so unspeakable that, seven years after being freed from Basra’s most feared interrogation centre, Ismael Samoi could not bring himself to look inside.

“They would go into your mind and whatever was your worst horror they would find it,” he said, as he used his cigarette lighter to guide the way down the crumbling stairs under the headquarters of the Amn al-Amm, the internal security agency, most hated of all Saddam’s secret police.

The building was struck by a British shell in the battle that led to the fall of Basra last Monday, but the detention blocks for political prisoners remained intact, as had the underground jail where Samoi spent what he describes as “a 22-month living nightmare”.

Last week, as the news reached Basra that US Marines had entered the heart of Baghdad, he summoned up the courage to return. He was not the only one. The secret police headquarters was full of former political prisoners returning — terrified to be back there and at the same time astonished to be wandering freely around — and families searching for the missing.

“Ismael!” shouted a thickset man in his forties, crushing Samoi in a bear-hug. For a moment they held each other in silence, too choked with emotion to speak.

The two men had been in the cell together, along with 15 to 20 others. It was often so crowded that Samoi and his friend, a boxing champion who asked to be identified as Fala, often slept standing.

They had helped keep each other’s spirits up over long months, but had lost touch when Samoi was transferred to Baghdad. Neither knew whether the other had survived.

“Look,” said Fala, the older man, pointing to two faded marks on the wall. “This is where we wrote our names in blood so people would one day know we had been here.”

“Are you still strong, Fala?” asked Samoi with a mischievous grin. Fala immediately knelt on the ground, allowing his old cell mate to climb onto his shoulders so that Samoi’s fingertips just reached a small grille high on the wall. “This was how we dreamt of freedom, just to touch the free air.”

The story was typical among those returning last week. “I was 23 years old and just married when they came for me,” said Samoi. “I had been sending information to the Shi’ite opposition based in Iran and someone reported me. I knew the regime was looking for me but I had to go to my job because my wife was pregnant and we needed the money. I was imprisoned for speaking the truth.”

His hands were shaking as he led the way to a series of small, stone-walled rooms. Pointing out the meat hooks in the ceiling from which he had been suspended by a rope tied round his ankles or hands, Samoi showed raised burn marks on his wrist. “They would beat us with rubber hosepipes while we were hanging until we dripped blood,” he said.

In another of the torture cells, bare wires dangled from the ceiling. “They would pour water on our heads, then attach the wires to our skulls to electrocute us. Other times they brought in a machine for generating electricity and would put a wire in each ear to give us electric shocks of 125 volts. Sometimes they would run it from the nail of my little finger to that of my friend. They had plenty of methods. This corridor would echo with screams of grown men.”

In the next corridor were a series of even smaller cells, with barely room for one person, where torture by scorpion was carried out. “We called these the lonely cells,” he said. “My 15-year-old cousin died here in the dirt and dust. Many died here.

“They would put you in alone with these big, very ugly creatures that get on your clothes so you can’t get them off and they sting.”

Samoi never had to endure the scorpion rooms. For him, the hardest thing to deal with was the hunger. “We were fed old bread so hard it hurt our mouths, and sometimes soup with insects. When I left I weighed 30kg (4st 10lb). I was like a skeleton.”

After being transferred to Baghdad and then released, Samoi was so malnourished that he spent three months in hospital with anaemia. Although he recovered, the mental scars remain, as they do for much of Iraqi society.

“All that time in prison my wife had no idea if I was alive or dead and had to give birth to our son all alone and in hiding,” said Samoi. “I hate Saddam for causing that anguish and for stealing the first 18 months of my son Basil’s life from me. And we have never been able to have another baby.”

The lack of information about Samoi’s fate was a typical tool of the regime to demonstrate what would happen to anyone who stepped out of line. Wives would sometimes even remarry, only for their husbands to reappear. Mothers cried every day for missing sons.

But it was not just men who were taken prisoner. When Fala was arrested for “praying too much”, because of his regular attendance at the local Shi’ite mosque, his wife was seized too. “My wife was in a different block at the back and held for four months. They shaved their heads and made them run naked.”

“I don’t know how he survived that,” said Samoi. “At least I could reassure myself that my wife was safely outside.”

“You don’t know how much your friendship helped me,” replied Fala. “I am a simple man, a poor man of no education, whereas you are a man of books; you taught yourself English, you write your memories. In all this, when we were treated like animals your friendship made me feel I was a person of value.”

The regime had no qualms about taking children prisoner either. Ali al-Mousawi, an English teacher who came to the Amn al-Amm last week to search for news of his lost brother, was arrested in 1999 with his entire family, including his sick mother and four-year-old son.

“My elder brother had taken part in an uprising to protest at Saddam’s assassination of one of our religious leaders, Imam Mohammed Saddar, in the holy city of Najaf,” he said.

“It was a big uprising — they shot up the Ba’ath (party) headquarters — but it failed and the next day they came for my brother. We know he was tortured here for three weeks but then we don’t know what happened to him.

“After three weeks they arrested 200 men and their families, anyone who prayed in our mosque. They came to our house in the night and arrested me and my wife, son, mother, father and younger brothers. We were all held for seven months.

“My little girl was born in jail with encephalitis. She is disabled and cannot walk or speak. For what? We had always kept our heads down.”

When the family was finally released, they discovered their house had been bulldozed, as had those of eight other families in the street who had also been arrested. Taking us to see the ruins on Al Hakamia street, al-Mousawi said: “They destroyed us. We had lived here 18 years. They took all we had — fridge, air-conditioners, television, furniture — then crushed the house.

“Even the land is worthless because they told us if we came back here they’d kill us. Now we live like beggars.”

The al-Mousawi family was refused any information about the fate of the missing son, even though the Ba’ath regime, like the Nazis, documented everything obsessively. “We think he was hanged but my mother cries every day because we just don’t know,” al-Mousawi said.

Over the past few days most of the records have been wiped out with the ransacking and burning of government buildings. But the ruins are full of people like al-Mousawi, sifting through dossiers and scattered papers for clues about missing loved ones.

Among the documents are interrogation and execution orders, reports on people showing photographs of their children, and pictures of those executed or tortured. “If I was to collect all the bad words in all the languages, it still would not be enough to describe Saddam,” said al-Mousawi.

Some of the most incriminating files may have been burnt by party officials such as the Amn al-Amm’s director, General Mehdi Aljobari, before they took flight, but witnesses remain. A former captain in the Iraqi army who gave his name as Kadhem took me to a naval complex, called the Academia of the Arabian Gulf, where he said he had witnessed the shooting in March 1991 of 24 political prisoners who had taken part in an uprising against Saddam the previous month. He said the bodies were bulldozed into the ground.

The man most Basrawi blame for the reign of terror is Saddam’s cousin and chief hatchet man, Ali Hassan al-Majid, who was sent to deal with Basra after the 1991 uprising and again after the attack on the Ba’ath party in 1999. Known as Chemical Ali after he used chemical weapons to kill thousands of Kurds in 1988, al-Majid’s brutal suppression of these uprisings explains why the population was so reluctant to rise up again when the war started.

Sheikh Adnan Salem Jassim, an influential figure in Basra, said al-Majid had called a meeting of all the tribal leaders a day before the war started. He asked them to warn their people against taking part in any rebellion. When one of them, Sheikh Abdul Rahim Bassooni, refused, al-Majid had him shot at the door of his house.

British forces claimed last week they had killed Chemical Ali, but most Basrawi still believe he escaped across the Shatt al-Arab towards Iran.

After 35 years of Ba’athist repression, old fears take a long while to die. Back at the prison the next day, Fala whispered that he had something to show me and we arranged to meet later on a bridge where nobody might “report back” on him.

“I’ve found my cousin, Abu Nathan,” he said. He held out a photograph of a dead man, his body spattered with blood from multiple gunshot wounds inflicted after the 1991 uprising. “At least we know,” he said. “The world should note all this and not forget, because none of this should be repeated.”

Here we must 'fess up as well. America encouraged the Kurds and Shiites to rise up against Saddam after Desert Storm. It was the direct consequence of an adherence to a United Nations restriction to liberate Kuwait and go no further. But it was a betrayal all the same, and we would lessen our manhood if we did not acknowledge it.

It is a manhood we have in some measure won back, or should I say, our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines have won back. And what is past, is past. All we can say is that now and henceforward: never again.

I haven't seen much reporting of the monstrous Iraqi atrocities in our local American newspapers.

They prefer to write about the looting, how many innocent Iraqis have been killed by American bombs and Jessica's latest meal.

Maybe this subject is just too painful for them. But, I doubt it.

In a way this is even worse than Hitler. Germany actually tried to exterminate people with as little pain as possible. It was not their goal to make the Jews suffer, they wanted them dead. Saddam's regime was built around humiliating and making people suffer.

“If I was to collect all the bad words in all the languages, it still would not be enough to describe Saddam,”

This says it all. My sentiments, exactly.

Mine too. I have exhausted myself trying to express my revulsion and find the words not only to describe Saddam, but everyone on the Left who aided and abetted him and condemned Bush. Each day, some new atrocity is discovered, and someone on the Left hurls yet another calumny, and my disgust continues to grow and can no longer be expressed in language.

All we can say is that now and henceforward: never again.

That's what the world said after the Holocaust. Never again. And yet, here we are again. Why? Because the Left continues to try to enslave mankind under totalitarian regimes and deliver the world to Satan. They never stop, they never rest. Their every thought and action is dedicated to this goal, which is why we must be ever vigilant.

Germany actually tried to exterminate people with as little pain as possible.

That's true. The Nazis were purely evil, yet in an antiseptic way. Because of their belief in their supposed superiority, they tried not to behave as animalistic savages and barbarians. The use of gassing to exterminate the Jews was concocted because Himmler wanted a bloodless way to commit mass murder. At one point, he personally witnessed Jews being shot in the back of the head and dumped into a mass grave, and it made him vomit. So he came up with a way to kill with a veneer of sophistication. The Ba'athists, on the other hand, got their jollies by being as barbaric and medieval as possible. While the sight of blood turned Himmler's stomach, Saddam and his mafia sadistically enjoyed the bloodiest of atrocities.

Hitler did do one barbaric thing, which was unusual. When the men were caught who had planned an unsuccessful assassination attempt, he ordered them to be hung with piano wire and he watched them die through a window.

Am I confused, or is the average quality of the writing much higher in British media?

Seems to be so. At least from the gems that Ivan posts. I try to read every single one.

is the average quality of the writing much higher in British media?

Agreed...it is. Perhaps they have not had to fight OBE and ebonics and multi-confusion-isms.....

I was raised by an English teacher and local papers drive me nuts with their lack of quality. Maybe the editor(s) are lazy, asleep, or both.

My God, those b*stard Ba'athists have the mark of Cain on their souls.

I hope not. That would mean no one would kill them in retaliation without God's wrath coming upon them.

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