Tuesday, November 16, 2004

Abu Gharaib Female Prisoner Reveals Her Ordeal

Huda Alazawi was one of the few women held in solitary in the
notorious Iraqi prison, Abu Gharaib. Following her release, she
revealed her ordeal and whatever she experienced there while talking
to LUKE HARDING of The Guardian

In November last year 39-year-old Huda Alazawi, a wealthy Baghdad
businesswoman, received a demand from an Iraqi informant, who was
working for the Americans in Adhamiya, a Sunni district of Baghdad.
His demand was simple: Madame Huda, as her friends and family know
her, had to give him $10,000. If she failed to pay up, he would
write a report claiming that she and her family were working for the
Iraqi resistance. He would pass it to the US military and they would
arrest her.

`It was clearly blackmail,' Alazawi says. `We knew that if we gave
in, there would be other demands.' The informant was as good as his
word. In November 2003, he wrote a report that prompted US soldiers
to interrogate Alazawi's brother, Ali, and her older sister, Nahla,
now 45. Wearing a balaclava, he also led several raids with US
soldiers on the families' antique-filled Baghdad properties.
On December 23, the Americans arrested another of Alazawi's
brothers, Ayad, 44. It was at this point that she decided to
confront the Americans directly. She marched into the US base in
Adhamiya, one of Saddam Hussein's former palaces. `A US captain told
me to come back with my two other brothers. He said we could talk
after that.' On Christmas Eve she returned with her brothers, Ali
and Mu'taz. `I waited for four hours. An American captain finally
interrogated me. After 10 minutes he announced that I was under
arrest.' Like thousands of other Iraqis detained by the Americans
since last year's invasion, Alazawi was about to experience the
reality of the Bush administration's `war on terror'.


`They handcuffed me and blindfolded me and put a piece of white
cloth over my eyes. They bundled me into a Humvee and took me to a
place inside the palace. I was dumped in a room with a single wooden
chair. It was extremely cold. After five hours they brought my
sister in. I couldn't see anything but I could recognise her from
her crying.'


Alazawi says that US guards left her sitting on the chair overnight,
and that the next day they took her to a room known by detainees
as `the torturing place'. `The US officer told us: `If you don't
confess we will torture you. So you have to confess.' My hands were
handcuffed. They took off my boots and stood me in the mud with my
face against the wall. I could hear women and men shouting and
weeping. I recognised one of the cries as my brother Mu'taz. I
wanted to see what was going on so I tried to move the cloth from my
eyes. When I did, I fainted.'


In November last year 39-year-old Huda Alazawi, a wealthy Baghdad
businesswoman, received a demand from an Iraqi informant, who was
working for the Americans in Adhamiya, a Sunni district of Baghdad.
His demand was simple: Madame Huda, as her friends and family know
her, had to give him $10,000. If she failed to pay up, he would
write a report claiming that she and her family were working for the
Iraqi resistance. He would pass it to the US military and they would
arrest her.


Like most Iraqi women, Alazawi is reluctant to talk about what she
saw but says that her brother Mu'taz was brutally sexually
assaulted. Then it was her turn to be interrogated. `The informant
and an American officer were both in the room. The informant started
talking. He said, `You are the lady who funds your brothers to
attack the Americans.' I speak some English so I replied: `He is a
liar.' The American officer then hit me on both cheeks. I fell to
the ground.

Alazawi says that American guards then made her stand with her face
against the wall for 12 hours, from noon until midnight. Afterwards
they returned her to her cell. `The cell had no ceiling. It was
raining. At midnight they threw something at my sister's feet. It
was my brother Ayad. He was bleeding from his legs, knees and
forehead. I told my sister: `Find out if he's still breathing.' She
said: `No. Nothing.' I started crying. The next day they took away
his body.'


The US military later issued a death certificate, citing the cause
of death as `cardiac arrest of unknown etiology'. The American
doctor who signed the certificate did not print his name, and his
signature is illegible. The body was returned to the family four
months later, on April 3, after the Abu Gharaib torture scandal
broke. The family took photographs of the body, also seen by the
Guardian, which revealed extensive bruising to the chest and arms,
and a severe head wound above the left eye.


Alazawi says that US guards left her sitting on the chair overnight,
and that the next day they took her to a room known by detainees
as `the torturing place'.


After Ayad's body had been taken away, Alazawi says that she and 18
other Iraqi detainees were put in a minibus inside the military
compound. `The Americans told us: `Nobody is going to sleep
tonight.' They played scary music continuously with loud voices. As
soon as someone fell asleep they started beating on the door. It was
Christmas. They kept us there for three days. Many of the US
soldiers were drunk.'

Finally, after a US guard broke her shoulder as she left the
lavatory, Alazawi and her surviving siblings were transferred –
first to a police academy in Baghdad's interior ministry and then,
on January 4 2004, to Abu Gharaib prison.

Alazawi, who has a 20-year-old daughter, Farah, and a four-year-old
granddaughter, Safat, spent the next 156 days in solitary
confinement. Along with five other Iraqi women, she was held in Abu
Gharaib's infamous "hard site" – the prison block inside the
compound where photographs of American guards sexually humiliating
Iraqi prisoners had been taken two months previously. The women were
kept in the upstairs cellblock; male detainees regarded
as `difficult' were held downstairs. The vast majority of inmates
lived in a series of open tents surrounded by razor wire and US
guard posts.

In her first weeks at Abu Gharaib, before the US military launched
its internal investigation into prisoner abuse, torture was
commonplace, she says. `The guards used wild dogs. I saw one of the
guards allow his dog to bite a 14-year-old boy on the leg. The boy's
name was Adil. Other guards frequently beat the men. I could see the
blood running from their noses. They would also take them for
compulsory cold showers even though it was January and February.
From the very beginning, it was mental and psychological war.'

Alazawi is reticent about the question of sexual abuse of Iraqi
women but says that neither she nor any of the other women in Abu
Gharaib at the time were sexually assaulted by US guards. In his
subsequent report into the scandal, however, Major General Antonio
Taquba found that at least one US military policemen had raped a
female inmate inside Abu Gharaib; a letter smuggled out of the
prison by a woman known only as `Noor', containing allegations of
rape, was found to be entirely accurate. Other witnesses interviewed
by the Guardian have said that US guards `repeatedly' raped a 14-
year-old Iraqi girl who was held in the block last year. They also
said that guards made several of the women inmates parade naked in
front of male prisoners.

Alazawi says that she was held in a two-metre-square cell, initially
with no bed and a bucket for a toilet. For the first three weeks she
was entirely `mute' after being told that talking was forbidden. The
US guards gave her only one book, a Koran. She managed to steal a
pen, and recorded incidents of abuse, with dates, in its margins.
During her first few months in custody, the US soldiers were brutal,
petty and tyrannous, she says.

`Because I could speak a bit of English I was given the job of
emptying the rubbish. There was never enough food and one day I came
across an old woman who had collapsed from hunger. The Americans
were always eating lots of hot food. I found some in a packet in a
bin and gave it to her. They caught me and threw me in a one-metre-
square punishment cell. They then poured cold water on me for four
hours.' She wrote the date down in her Koran: February 24 2004.
For the first four months, apart from frequent interrogations, she
was not allowed out of the block. Alazawi says she was repeatedly
asked whether she was in the Resistance and whether she had fired
rockets at US soldiers (she is 5ft 3in tall). `It became a running
joke. The other women began to nickname me the Queen of the RPG
[rocket-propelled grenade]. The American interrogators were entirely
ignorant and knew nothing about Iraqi people. The vast majority of
people there were innocent.'

After the Abu Gharaib scandal broke in April, Alazawi was allowed to
exercise in the scrubby yard outside for 10 minutes a day. She got a
bed. She was also assigned a new female guard, `Mrs Palmer', who
helped the women with their English and in turn tried to learn
Arabic. In May, Major General Geoffrey Miller, assigned to Abu
Gharaib by Washington in the aftermath of the torture scandal,
escorted a large group of journalists around the prison for the
first time. The previous night, Alazawi says, US guards evacuated
all the juveniles and male detainees from her cellblock, leaving
only her and a handful of other women upstairs.

`Mrs Palmer told us that during the inspection we had to lie quietly
on our beds. She said that if we behaved we would be allowed to
spend more time out of our cells in the sun. The following day
General Miller turned up with a huge number of journalists. I heard
him telling them that some of the people kept in here were
murderers. I shouted out: `We are not the killers. You are the
killers. This is our country. You have invaded it.' After that they
didn't let me out of my cell for an entire month. A US officer came
to me and said: `Because of you we have all been punished'.'

Alazawi says she was unimpressed by Miller. `It was obvious he liked
having his photo taken,' she says. Over the next few weeks, the US
military began releasing hundreds of Abu Gharaib detainees as part
of a damage limitation exercise. Alazawi and her sister were moved
from their cells to a tent. Three generals also came to interview
her and asked her to describe what had happened to Ayad, her
brother. They did not, however, offer an apology. The other women
were gradually released, including her sister. Finally, on July 19,
a helicopter took Alazawi to Al Taji, a military base just north of
Baghdad.

`After eight months in prison they suddenly treated me like a queen.
It was weird,' she says. `They offered me some Pepsi. I could take a
shower. There was air conditioning. There were four female soldiers
to look after me. The doctor came to see me four times in 24 hours.
They made me sign a piece of paper promising not to leave the
country. And then I was free.'

A US military spokesman said that Alazawi was known to him, but
disputed her claim to have been held in solitary for 157 days:'She
and her sister, which [sic] were the last two females we detained at
Abu Gharaib, were separated from the male detainees in keeping with
the cultural sensitivities.' He added, `The fact that abuses
occurred isn't really news any more. We know they did and those who
are accused are being prosecuted for it.'

Now Alazawi is trying to piece her life back together. She is back
at work in Baghdad, where she runs businesses importing foreign cars
and electrical goods, surrounded by respectful staff who bring
endless cups of sweet Iraqi coffee. Business appears to be
flourishing. Friends of the family in Arab dish-dash – many of whom
come from Iraq's Sunni elite – drop in and exchange gossip on her
white leather sofas. But after her release, her millionaire husband
announced that he was divorcing her.

Several of the other former women detainees in Abu Gharaib are
believed to have disappeared; others have husbands who have also
disowned them. Alazawi's surviving brothers, Ali – prisoner number
156215 – and Mu'taz – 156216 – are still inside Abu Gharaib. The US
military continues to detain them and 2,400 other prisoners without
charge or legal access, in contravention of the Geneva Convention.
Alazawi says that she has hired lawyers to pursue the Iraqi
informant who she blames for her brother's death.¨

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