| 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.¨ | |
Showing posts with label Abu Gharaib. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Abu Gharaib. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 16, 2004
Abu Gharaib Female Prisoner Reveals Her Ordeal
Monday, November 15, 2004
SHEIKH GUARANTEES SOUGHT FOR JAIL RELEASES
| American military hopes to end the insurgency by turning to Iraqi tribal traditions. By Abdel Karem al-Hashemy in Baghdad | |
| Taxi driver Satar Majeed Suleiman walked out of Abu Ghraib prison this June, after spending nearly a year behind bars. Like many of his fellow prisoners, Suleiman says he had no involvement in the anti-Coalition insurgency for which he was detained. "I was shooting in the air to frighten thieves, when an American patrol passed by," he said. | |
| As a result, he spent months in a harsh place where, though he was not beaten, he had little protection against the cold of the desert winter and the heat of summer. US forces do not "arrest anyone without a reason", said Lieutenant Colonel Tim Ryan, US military commander responsible for the area west of Baghdad , which includes Suleiman's home of Bab al-Sheikh. Ryan agreed to release Suleiman after the taxi driver's local tribal leader, Sheikh Abdul Rida al-Aweili, agreed to vouch for the detainee's good behaviour. Similar assurances are being sought across the region, one of the centres of Iraq 's insurgency. They have led to the release of elderly men in poor health, tribal elders, and at least two women, whose detention, Aweili said, had been a cause of tension. "We are sure that some were arrested because of false accusations," the sheikh said. He also said the assurances were being made to enable tribal leaders to reassert their authority, and to restrain their followers, angry at intrusive raids and what they consider to be unjustifiable detentions. While not conceding the innocence of those detained, the US military acknowledged that it erred in ignoring the role of the sheikh as mediator between the population and the central authority. "It was a mistake for us to ignore the tribal customs of the Iraqi culture," said Captain Joseph James, public affairs officer for Ryan's 2-12 Cavalry, in an email to IWPR. Now, the unit has begun to release prisoners if their sheikh will guarantee that they will not participate in attacks. "Sheiks should submit a list of names for prisoners that they guarantee not to conduct future attacks against Coalition forces," James said. "If the agreement is breached, Sheiks will be notified and that they should either bring the person to the Coalition or show us his whereabouts. "In return, the US troops are committed not to arrest any person without notifying the tribal council, not arresting women, not raiding houses and mosques, and to respect Iraqi tradition and customs." If the attacks cease, James continued, the US military can "move forward" in developing the region, saying that, altogether, some 336 detainees have been released through the policy in the Abu Ghraib region. "We hold to the agreement [with the American troops] and we must respect it. Any one who breaches it will be held accountable by his tribe leader," said Sheik Hashem Najem al-Hasen al-Mohammadi, head of the region's Iraqi tribes association. Still, many of the released detainees remain angry over their detentions. "They treat dogs better than us," said Abd al-Wadood Katab, 40, a professor of psychology at the University of Tikrit . Katab said he was held 14 months in the southern detention centre of Bucca for possessing weapons and inciting violence. "They used to leave us with no cold water, they shouted and struck us. I haven't done anything to be arrested - all Iraqis possess weapons," he said. Abdel Karem al-Hashemy is an IWPR trainee. | |
Prisoner Abuse covered up
| LONDON (Reuters) - The U.S. general formerly in charge of Baghdad's notorious Abu Ghraib prison said on Tuesday abuse of Iraqi captives was hidden from her in a cover-up that may reach all the way to the Pentagon or White House. Speaking on the same day a U.S. soldier at the center of the prisoner abuse scandal is due to face a military court, Brigadier-General Janis Karpinski said she was deliberately kept in the dark about abuse and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners. | |
| "A very reliable witness has made a statement indicating that, not only was I not included in any of the meetings discussing interrogation operations, but specific measures were taken to ensure I would not have access to those facilities, that information or any of the details of interrogation at Abu Ghraib or anywhere else," Karpinski told Britain 's BBC radio. | |
| Karpinski, responsible for the military police who ran prisons in Iraq when pictures were taken showing prisoners being abused, has been suspended from her post but not charged with any crime. She said that those with "full knowledge" of what was going on in Abu Ghraib worked to keep her from discovering the truth. Asked if a cover-up meant involvement of the White House or Pentagon, she said: "I have not seen the statement but the indication is it may have." Photographs of U.S. military police abusing hooded prisoners in Abu Ghraib and accusations of abuse by British and other troops have fueled Arab and international anger, shaking President Bush 's efforts to stabilize Iraq. In Britain , an Iraqi witness alleged at a court hearing last week that UK soldiers had tortured detainees by beating and kicking them and pouring freezing water over them. U.S. Private First Class Lynndie England , the 21-year-old military police officer who became the public face of inmate abuse at Abu Ghraib, faces a hearing on Tuesday to determine whether she will be tried on charges of abuse and committing indecent acts. Karpinski told the BBC she never personally witnessed abuse at Abu Ghraib or at any of the prisons she commanded. She has also said she was told by a military intelligence commander that detainees should be "treated like dogs." http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=586&e=1&u=/nm/20040803/wl_nm/iraq_karpinksi_dc | |
Monday, September 20, 2004
After Abu Ghraib
| After Abu Ghraib: "I Hate Them" | |||
| Viewpoints FM: John With the kidnappers and beheaders of Americans in Iraq making their proclaimed demand the release of Iraqi women in American prisons, the testimony of an Iraqi woman who has been there is relevant.
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Saturday, July 24, 2004
Abu Ghraib, Whitewashed
Abu Ghraib, Whitewashed | |
| Published: July 24, 2004 | |
| A week ago, John Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he was satisfied that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was keeping his promise to leave no stone unturned to investigate the atrocities of Abu Ghraib prison. A newly released report by the Army's inspector general shows that Mr. Rumsfeld's team may be turning over stones, but it's not looking under them. | |
| The authors of this 300-page whitewash say they found no "systemic" problem - even though there were 94 documented cases of prisoner abuse, including some 40 deaths, 20 of them homicides; even though only four prisons of the 16 they visited had copies of the Geneva Conventions; even though Abu Ghraib was a cesspool with one shower for every 50 inmates; even though the military police were improperly involved in interrogations; even though young people plucked from civilian life were sent to guard prisoners - 50,000 of them in all - with no training. Never mind any of that. The report pins most of the blame on those depressingly familiar culprits, a few soldiers who behaved badly. It does grudgingly concede that "in some cases, abuse was accompanied by leadership failure at the tactical level," but the report absolves anyone of rank, in keeping with the investigation's spirit. The inspector general's staff did not dig into the abuse cases, but merely listed them. It based its findings on the comical observation that "commanders, leaders and soldiers treated detainees humanely" while investigators from the Pentagon were watching. And it made no attempt to find out who had authorized threatening prisoners with dogs and sexually humiliating hooded men, to name two American practices the Red Cross found to be common. The inspector general's see-no-evil team simply said it couldn't find those "approach techniques" in the Army field manual. Even the report's release on Thursday was an exercise in misdirection, timed to be overshadowed by the 9/11 commission's report. Senators on the armed services panel were outraged at the report's shoddiness and timing, but should not have been surprised. The Defense Department has consistently tried to stymie Mr. Warner's investigation. It "misplaced" thousands of pages from Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba's report on Abu Ghraib, the only credible military account so far. It stalled the completion of a pivotal look at Army intelligence by two other Army generals until lawmakers went off to the political conventions and summer vacations. And it ignored Senate demands for the Red Cross reports on American military prisons for months. The Pentagon finally brought those documents to the Senate in the last two weeks, in a way that ensured they would be of minimal use. The voluminous reports were shown briefly to senators and a few members of the Armed Services Committee staff after the senators' personal aides were ushered out. Then the reports were hauled back to the Pentagon. Mr. Warner has admirably resisted pressure from the White House and Republican leaders in Congress to stop his investigation. But he is showing signs of losing appetite for the fight. Mr. Warner held only one hearing in the last month - on the new report - and agreed to the ground rules on the Red Cross reports. We've always been skeptical that the Defense Department can investigate itself credibly, and now it's obvious that it plans to stick to the "few bad apples" excuse. The only way to learn why innocent Iraqis were tortured by American soldiers is a formal Congressional inquiry, with subpoena power. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/24/opinion/24sat1.html?th | |
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