Torture’s Victims Tell of Screams Unheard

Sheik Lami Abbas Ajali looked around at the small cell where he spent several bleak weeks of his life and recounted the torture: how he was hit, prodded, had his eyelids pulled back, had electric shocks applied to his temples and genitals, how his hands were cuffed behind him then raised until he was off the ground.

He recalled Saturday how torturers stuffed 10 suspects into an 8-by-6-foot room so only two could sleep at any given time while the other eight were forced to stand. And how he was kept blindfolded, never sure where he was, where they were taking him, what would hit him next.

With the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime, the spotlight now illuminates such places as the Nasiriyah Detention and Security Center, a lair of the secret police on Habubi Street in the middle of this mid-size Iraqi city. Torture was so widespread in Iraq under the Baath regime, and performed with such impunity, that virtually every community had its own house of horrors. And now their doors have been thrown open.

A few weeks ago, allied aircraft bombed the detention center amid fighting in Nasiriyah. Now daylight can be seen through the roof and walls as twisted reinforcement rods reach for the sky at jagged angles.

There were no neighbors to hear the screams, residents said, because the area was off-limits and reserved for military use. Ordinary people said they knew to avert their eyes and avoid showing any interest in the building.

“We all knew about it, but no one would even walk down this street,” said Jamal Rashid, 35, a trader. “Only the Baath Party members could come anywhere near here.”

The sheik returned to the prison and torture chamber Saturday for the first time since he was detained in March 1996. His crime, he said, was nothing more than being a Shiite Muslim, which was viewed suspiciously by the Sunni-dominated regime.

The accounts by Ajali and others could not be independently verified, but human rights groups said they match a pattern seen in Hussein’s Iraq.

Stories like Ajali’s -- widely known but never aired before -- are being told throughout the country now. The revelations are cathartic for some but are giving rise to rumors and even some false hopes.

A frenzy erupted Saturday outside Nasiriyah’s former police station, a quarter-mile from the prison, where hundreds of young men clawed, elbowed and jostled one another to get into a modest-sized hole.

As a few managed to duck down into it, reports swept the crowd that prisoners were trapped in underground cells, abandoned by the Baath regime, with no way to get out. Several people then threatened to topple a nearby statue in the center of a roundabout as a related rumor spread that political prisoners released in 1991 had been seen exiting from a secret trapdoor under the statue.

As the crowd grew more agitated, members of the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit moved in to investigate but found only dirty sewer pipes before attempting to disperse the crowd. In Basra and other cities, similar rumors arose involving underground prisons.

“We’re getting reports of the same thing happening all over Iraq,” said Zaab Sethna, an aide to Ahmad Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress, which long opposed Hussein. “There doesn’t seem to be anything to it, but it suggests how many people are desperately searching for their lost relatives.”

Many of them likely will never appear.

A government file obtained by the Los Angeles Times provides a detailed look at the case of a Shiite suspect who was accused of treason and murder, denied the opportunity to defend himself and sentenced to death -- one of the tens of thousands detained over the past two decades as the Baath Party sought to crush the religious group.

Hussein Aboud Ahmed Salim, a trader living in Baghdad, was arrested and held at the Nasiriyah detention center on March 2, 1997, on charges of belonging to Iran’s Dawa party.

Seven months later, he was sentenced to death under Revolutionary Law 232 “considering his crime, treason with dishonor.” A note in his file adds that he should not be given any opportunity to counter the charges or mount an appeal. The next day, another note gives the general security service the go-ahead to seize all of Salim’s money, “registered and unregistered.”

The signatures on the documents are illegible, underscoring the lengths that regime members have gone to hide their identities and, by extension, how difficult it may be in the post-Saddam Hussein era to identify and hold war criminals accountable.

The heart of the Salim case appears to be handwritten confessions by Salim himself and Latif Khalaf Tatoum Shamin, who evidently conspired with and informed on Salim.

The two five-page confessions tell a long, winding tale of conspiracy and intrigue during which Salim met someone at the train station intent on “killing Baath party members and setting up destructive operations to destroy the regime.”

This person managed to recruit Salim, who in turn recruited three friends to join the outlawed Dawa party. They attacked a polling center during a 1995 election for Saddam Hussein. Then, according to the file, they killed a Baath official named Ibrahim Jabar Zamel and took his gun.

Shamin, the informer, said in his handwritten confession that he had known Salim since high school. “We always discussed religious ideas and how to fight Saddam’s regime,” he wrote.

His confession discussed various night meetings under bridges, payoffs, drives down lush green roads and a failed plot to put a grenade in the bathroom of the Shuaikh police rest area. An arrest warrant was issued for Salim’s three friends, but the files suggest they fled and could not be found.

Also in the file is a letter from Salim’s sister, Seham Aboud Ahmed Salim, expressing concern that she hadn’t heard anything in the 14 months since he was taken by police and requesting information about him.

“We all stand under the flag of God and the leading president Saddam Hussein,” his sister wrote in closing. It is not clear whether he had been executed by then.

At the detention center, Sheik Ajali followed scampering children through a small doorway and into a part of the damaged building where several of the cells remain.

On the day he was taken into custody, three plainclothes secret police came to his Hussainia -- the term Shiites use for their mosques -- and quietly and politely asked him to come with them. “They took me in a decent, quiet way,” he said. “Then the torture started.”

Over the next several weeks they tortured him within the walls of the Nasiriyah security center, then transferred him to a larger prison in Baghdad for more torture and solitary confinement, he said, before they transferred him back to Nasiriyah for still more torture.

During interrogation sessions, they pressed him on whether he had links to Iran -- a stronghold of the Shiite faith -- whether he was a member of the Iranian Dawa party, what his beliefs were and whether he was plotting against Hussein. Patiently and steadily, he said, he denied their accusations.

The sheik’s wife, eight daughters and four sons were convinced he had been executed, he said. To this day, he said, he has little idea why he was released, having signed some papers without knowing what they said. His family was ecstatic when he returned, he recalled.

During the torture sessions, which he said went on for hours at a time, he would draw on his faith. They forced him to repeat slogans praising Saddam and to join the Baath Party, which he did -- all part of what you had to do to survive, he said.

One of the tiny cells still has wires dangling from the ceiling where prisoners were reportedly hung, sometimes upside down, from their manacles.