We were raped with sticks and bottles – Freed Iraqi prisoners

Heba al-Shamary (name changed for security reasons) was released last week from an Iraqi prison where she spent the last four years.

“I was tortured and raped repeatedly by the Iraqi security forces,” she told Al Jazeera. “I want to tell the world what I and other Iraqi women in prison have had to go through these last years. It has been a hell.”

Heba was charged with terrorism, a fate faced by many Iraqis who are detained by security forces.

“I now want to explain to people what is occurring in the prisons that [Prime Minister Nouri al-] Maliki and his gangs are running,” Heba added. “I was raped over and over again, I was kicked and beaten and insulted and spit upon.”

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Heba’s story, horrific as it is, unfortunately is but one example of what a recent report from Amnesty International refers to as “a grim cycle of human rights abuses” in Iraq today.

The report, “Iraq: Still paying a high price after a decade of abuses”, exposes a long chronology of torture and other ill-treatment of detainees committed by Iraqi security forces, as well as by foreign troops, in the wake of the US-led 2003 invasion.

One Iraqi woman, speaking on condition of anonymity, said her nephew was first detained when he was just 18. Held under the infamous Article Four which gives the government the ability to arrest anyone “suspected” of terrorism, he was charged with terrorism. She told, in detail, of how her nephew was treated:

“They beat him with metal pipes, used harsh curse words and swore against his sect and his Allah (because he is Sunni) and why God was not helping him, and that they would bring up the prisoners’ mothers and sisters to rape them,” she explained to Al Jazeera.  “Then they used electricity to burn different places of his body. They took all his cloths off in winter and left them naked out in the yard to freeze.”

Her nephew, who was released after four years imprisonment after the Iraqi appeals court deemed him innocent, was then arrested 10 days after his release, again under Article 4. This law gives the government of Prime Minister Maliki broad license to detain Iraqis. Article four and other laws provide the government the ability to impose the death penalty for nearly 50 crimes, including terrorism, kidnapping, and murder, but also for offenses such as damage to public property.

While her nephew was free, he informed his aunt of how he and other detainees were tortured.

“They made some other inmates stand barefoot during Iraq’s summer on burning concrete pavement to have sunburn, and without drinking water until they fainted. They took some of them, broke so many of their bones, mutilated their faces with a knife and threw them back in the cell to let the others know that this is what will happen to them.”

She said her nephew was tortured daily, as he wouldn’t confess to a crime he says he didn’t commit. He wouldn’t give names of his co-conspirators, as there were none, she said.

“Finally, after the death of many of his inmates under torture, he agreed to sign up a false confession written by the interrogators, even though he had witnesses who have seen him in another place the day that crime has happened,” she added.

He remains in prison, where he has told his aunt he is now being tortured by militiamen and one of his eyes has been lanced by them.

Yousef Abdul Rahman has an equally shocking story, from being detained in 2011 and spending four months in “the worst of prisons”.

“I was kept in a Maliki prison, where they dumped cold water on me and used electricity on me,” he told Al Jazeera. “Many of the prisoners with me were raped. They were raped with sticks and bottles. I saw the blood on their bodies, and I saw so many men this happened to.”

In today’s Iraq, it is unfortunately all too easy to find Iraqis who have had loved ones who have been detained and tortured, and the trend is increasing, according to Iraqis Al Jazeera spoke with, along with several human rights groups.

‘This was really harmful to me’

Ahmed Hassan, a 43-year-old taxi driver, was detained by Iraqi police at his home in the Adhamiyah district of Baghdad in December 2008. He was charged with “terrorism”, and held in a federal police prison in nearby Khadimiyah.

Hassan told Al Jazeera the prison was run by the Ministry of Interior, but alleged it was overseen by Prime Minister al-Maliki himself.

He said he was regularly tortured and held in a six-by-four metre cell with “at least 120 detainees, with a small toilet that has no door, and scarce running water”.

Prisoners received one meal a day that was often undercooked. And it was so crowded that “most of us would be forced to sleep standing”, he said.

Hassan explained that his jailors had “various techniques of torture”.

“They forced me to drink huge amounts of water and then would tie up the head of my penis so I could not urinate. This was really harmful to me,” said Hassan.

Another method was to “take off my fingernails with a pair of pliers, one by one.”

This was an attempt to elicit confessions for crimes he said he never committed.

Hassan said he was also hung upside down from his feet with his head placed in a bucket of water while he was whipped with plastic rods.

Stories of detentions and torture and executions are everywhere in today’s Iraq.

Sheikh Khaled Hamoud Al-Jumaili, a leader of the ongoing demonstrations in Fallujah against the Maliki government, told Al Jazeera there that “thousands of Fallujans have been detained and we don’t know how many are now dead or on death row.”

“The fighting from 2004 has never stopped,” he added. “We simply switched from fighting the Americans to fighting Maliki and his injustice and corruption.”

Another Fallujah sheikh, who asked to speak on condition of anonymity, told Al Jazeera he was detained and tortured by “Maliki’s forces” in 2012.

“I was taken to the Khadamiyah prison [in Baghdad] and tortured there,” he said while pulling up his shirt to reveal dark puncture wounds across his back. “I was beaten with sticks, punched, starved, spit upon, and hung by my ankles and then wrists. Maliki is even worse than the Americans.”

Iraq currently has one of the highest rates of death sentences in the world, and Sunnis say they are suffering disproportionately from the killings.

Stories like those from Jassim and Hassan are exactly the kind referenced in the recent Amnesty International report.

“Torture is rife and committed with impunity by government security forces, particularly against detainees arrested under anti-terrorism while they are held incommunicado for interrogation,” the report states.

“Detainees have alleged that they were tortured to force them to ‘confess’ to serious crimes or to incriminate others while held in these conditions. Many have repudiated their confessions at trial only to see the courts admit them as evidence of their guilt, without investigating their torture allegations, sentencing them to long term imprisonment or death.”

Executions and international condemnation

Saadiya Naif, 60, has had three of her sons executed – two by American forces during the occupation, and one in 2008 by Iraqis.

“Baker was arrested by Iraqi police and held for one and a half years,” she told Al Jazeera, while weeping. “He was only 19 when they executed him. I tried to use lawyers to get him out of prison, but all three of them received death threats. Then, after one and a half years in prison, he phoned me to say goodbye, because he was to be executed the next day.”

According to international human rights groups, at least 3,000 Iraqis received death sentences since 2005, which was the year capital punishment was reinstated after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

Source: Punch