Three Iraqi Ex-POWs Tell of Iranian Torture

They stood out, these three visitors to Los Angeles. They looked jarringly out of place in the lobby of their Hollywood hotel, a place full of young, excited Americans, some of them seemingly high on more than youth, running in and out, playing “hold the elevator,” their shouts and shrieks echoing in the vast hall.

The visitors made their way to the lounge area slowly, out of deference to the blinded one, Yonan Yousif Mansoor, who had none of the cautious-but-sure moves of one long-blind or well-trained.

The youngest of them, Adil Rafik Lazim, walked with one aluminum crutch, his right leg appearing to end in some strange artificial-looking apparatus jammed into his shoe.

The third, Raad Abd-Al-Hadi Mousa, unsmiling and intense, moved stiffly, favoring one foot.

The three are Iraqis who not too long ago were prisoners of war in the Islamic Republic of Iran. They were accompanied in Los Angeles recently by several Iraqi representatives from the Foreign Ministry in Baghdad and their embassy in Washington, and a few friends from the National Assn. of Arab-Americans.

“We are soldiers of the so-called forgotten war,” they said through an interpreter at an interview.

A war of high attrition that has been waged on the Iran-Iraq borders since 1980, the war has not been so forgotten of late. The Iranians, steadfastly refusing to negotiate a truce unless Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is removed from office, have been reported readying for a major confrontation.

Well-Timed Visit

Also, while the POWs and their companions did not say so, it seemed no accident that the visit came in the wake of well-publicized charges and reports out of Iran concerning the alleged use of chemical warfare on the part of Iraq.

Rather, Mousa said, they had come “to show the American public the treatment of Iraqi prisoners by the Iranian regime and to try to move hearts to pressure the International Red Cross to do more work for the release of 50,000 prisoners.”

Specifically, they were urging, they said, a mutual exchange of prisoners, the granting of permission by the Iranian regime for regular visits to the POW camps by the International Committee of the Red Cross, thrown out by the Iranians since 1984 on accusations of spying for Iraq and provoking violence, and that the Iranians agree to release the names of prisoners.

Over the course of the war, the Red Cross has had harsh charges to make against both sides regarding the treatment of prisoners and observance of the Geneva Convention. In the past few years, however, the criticism has focused most on Iran, protesting the same situations that the POWs announced they seek to change.

In a statement about the conditions made by Alexander Hay, president of the international committee of the Red Cross in 1984 in Geneva, the Red Cross charged that “ideological and political pressure, intimidation, systematic ‘re-education’ and attacks on the honor and dignity of the prisoners have remained a constant feature of life in the camps.”

The Iraqi POWs who came to Los Angeles sought to underscore those charges by telling their individual stories through the media and directly to individuals, especially Arab-Americans, as they would later that day at a dinner at the Arab Community Center.

Their stories:

The oldest of them, Mansoor, 41, was a private in the volunteer Iraqi Popular Army when he ran out of ammunition and was captured east of Basra in May, 1982. A Chaldean Christian from Sulaymaniyah in the northeast, he was married, the father of three children and had been a government technician.

A balding, gray-haired, heavyset man, he speaks, the interpreter said, a colloquial Arabic that is both colorful and humorous. Mansoor remembered the only meal given him while being transported, “a piece of bread and three dates”; he said of the desert location of the prison camp near the Afghan border, “even a pigeon does not live there,” and recalled coming upon two prisoners engaged in a game, not of chess as he first thought, but in “who could remove the most lice from his body,” then dryly commented that because he was Christian he had to clean the toilets.

It was his Christianity that got him most in trouble in prison, he said. He would not convert. And thus the beatings that eventually blinded him, permanently in his right eye and temporarily, it is hoped, in his left. He also lost his hearing in his right ear. Those injuries finally won him his freedom when he was part of an exchange of handicapped prisoners last October.

As he spoke, his colleagues had him lean over to show the deep gash that traverses most of the right side of his head.

“Three-face cable,” they all say knowingly, in English. They are words that returned frequently during the three narratives, always in English, always referring to some sort of heavy electrical cable they said the Iranians use for beatings.

Daily Brainwashing

“Every day the mullahs came to brainwash us. They make you repeat slogans that you are an infidel. If you do not, sometimes they put you in ice, packing you up to the neck for 15 to 30 minutes. For Muslims who would not pray the mullahs carry the three-face cable and give 15 strokes. Islam recommends that prisoners be taken care of, but in Iran,” he said of the cable, “that’s Islam.”

To Raad Abd-Al-Hadi Mousa, 34, the country of his captors would be more aptly called the Non- Islamic Republic of Iran, because of the inhuman practices he said he witnessed there. From a family of 10 in Rawanduz, in northeast Iraq, he had obtained his BA degree when he was drafted into the infantry in 1978. He was taken captive near Amarah in eastern Iraq on May 21, 1981, when he was hit with shrapnel in his chest and foot, and was released on Oct. 25, 1984.

The lessons of Iranian Islam began immediately for him. At the time of his capture, he said, he saw a mullah shoot and kill two of his severely wounded comrades. Another mullah wanted the gold ring Mousa’s colleague Raad Salman was wearing, needing it, he said, because he had a family to support. The mullah persuaded theacaptive to let him shoot him in the finger. He would get the ring; the soldier would get sent home.

“And that is what happened,” Mousa said.

Solitary Confinement

He, too, told stories of ice torture, of beatings with three-face cable, of solitary cells with dimensions of one square meter.

Once when he was ill with influenza and running a high fever, Mousa asked for medical help. He said the response was not until he repeated “Death to Saddam Hussein” several times. Mousa did so. And then he was asked his father’s name. Abdul Hadi.

If he wanted to go to the hospital, he said he was told, he would have to say death to Saddam Hussein and death to his father.

“For the sake of going to the hospital, I said it. I was beaten and kicked.”

Adil Rafik Lazim, 29, was working as a goldsmith with his father in Baghdad when he was drafted. He was captured on the same day as Mousa, May 21, 1981, in Dehlawia, after being hit in the pelvic area, an injury related to the foot, he said.

He was taken to a hospital in Teheran, he said, where the treatments proved worse than the injury. His foot was improperly fitted with an iron mold that cut into the muscle. His cries and complaints went unheeded until his bone was protruding, he said. As a result, his foot is shortened and curved and he cannot walk without the apparatus that encases his calf and ends at an angle in his shoe.

Sadistic Deprivations

The most sadistic treatment he received related to his injury, he said. He cannot use the Asian squat-style toilets that were common in the prisons, as they are in much of the Middle East, so he improvised a seat for himself out of a hard-to-come-by box. When the guard discovered it, he destroyed it, and any of the replacements Lazim managed to find.

“It was one of my main tortures,” he said of it, saying he would try going without food for days at a time, trying to avoid the ordeal.

One by one they told the circumstances of their capture and the details of their imprisonment. From all three came stories of humiliation, of being stripped to their underwear and transported through villages for all to see, stoned and spat on; of long waits in the hot sun; of rough transport and uncertain destinations.

The conditions they described in the various prisons all included claims of bitter, dirty drinking water and spoiled or poor-quality food full of flies (Lazim remembering tinned meat with an expiration date of 1975 that they ate in 1983), chronic dysentery, the infections (often skin diseases--scabies being the worst). They spoke of months between baths; and then of shared bathing with up to 20 other prisoners. No cigarettes or razor blades. Lice-infested blankets. No change of clothing. Sleeping three to a wood bed or on damp, concrete floors.

Worst of all, they agreed, no letters from home. Not that mail did not come: The guards, members of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolutionary committees, would hold up letters addressed to them and destroy them, they recalled.

On those rare occasions when Red Cross representatives were admitted to the camps, they were accompanied, the POWs said, by Arabic-speaking Iranians. Similarly, they said, in general the camps were “planted” with Iranians who had lived in Iraq.

Protestors Killed

Both Mansoor and Mousa said they witnessed prison protests and demonstrations which resulted in the guards firing on the prison populations, Mansoor saying he saw an incident on Feb. 13, 1983, where a protest against the killing of two Yazidis (members of a Muslim sect) resulted in the killing of 65 and wounding of 120.

For the most part they told their stories in a matter-of-fact manner. Just once, at the Arab community center, Mansoor broke down in the middle of his remarks, ending abruptly with the plea, “My only wish is that the Red Cross could go back to inspect my colleagues.”

The dinner, decidedly not a formal banquet, was a friendly, almost homey occasion, with long communal tables, paper plates and several posters of Saddam Hussein tacked to the walls for the occasion. Prior to speaking, Lazim had sat beside Mansoor, patiently feeding plastic forkfuls of lamb and rice to the blind man.

They spoke to a sympathetic group of Arab-Americans who wanted to know also about the treatment of Iranians in Iraqi prisons. The POWs would not know, the Foreign Ministry representatives answered, but informed the group that the International Red Cross has a permanent mission of 22 in Baghdad who regularly visit the camps. POWs in Iraq, the representatives said, receive the same rations and medical care that Iraqi soldiers receive. They may also send and receive mail.

“It’s a matter of principle, lady,” the official told the woman who had asked why the difference in treatment. “We follow international law.” He also said the charges about Iraq using chemical warfare were false.

Those gathered seemed to accept what they heard. One man stood and thanked the visitors, saying, “In the Arab community we support you and the leadership of Saddam Hussein. I’m a Jordanian, not an Iraqi. I’m still an Arab although I have 32 years here. I don’t want my family in Jordan to live under the Khomeini regime. Thank God for the Iraqi army.”