NEWSLETTER

Even after the guards got caught stacking naked prisoners like a hairy, human-rights-violating cheerleading team in 2004, very little changed in the awful conditions at Abu Ghraib. The prison had to be completely emptied in March 2006 to remove it from “worst place on earth” status.

Sana and her son Saleh spent a few months as prisoners there before it was shut down, and then they told us their stories and then we cried.

hey detained my husband—he was a Baath Party member. He died from a heart attack, which was caused by his torture. We took his body from the prison in Abu Ghraib. After the funeral ceremony, the police knocked down the door to my house. They were fully armed and took my eldest son from me like barbarians.

I was taken to a big school where the rest of the detainees were blindfolded and handcuffed to the back of a pickup truck. It was early December 2005, and the air chilled my bones. The next morning they took me to a classroom. I realized this by seeing desks and a blackboard on wall. No one spoke to me. They fed me a piece of bread and gave me a glass of water. Eight other women were with me in the same room, each in a corner. Not a single word was exchanged between us. We didn’t know what crime we committed or why we were brought to the school.

There were voices of people outside the room—screaming, crying, and shouting. Males were being tortured. We were kept in the room until 5:30 PM, and then we were once again blindfolded and taken to a place where there were about 35 women. It was a women’s prison where prostitutes used to be jailed.

We were kept there for two days, then we were transferred to the second floor of Abu Ghraib and isolated in small, filthy, two-by-two rooms. There was a shared toilet, which was so dirty you couldn’t tell what color it was. It was covered in excrement. After five days, I was called to meet an American official. He accused me of hiding terrorists inside my house. He asked where they were, and I swore I didn’t know what they were talking about. This did not convince him. He slapped me many times and he threatened to rape me. However, I was not raped. None of us were raped as far as I know.

Our duty during the day was to empty the men’s toilets by taking buckets full of excrement to outdoor areas. Weeks went by. No one told us anything. We weren’t sleeping well due to males screaming from torture at night. Suddenly we were ordered to clean our whole floor in addition to the male floors because UN representatives were coming to visit the building. We were released two days after they came.

I still don’t know why I was detained—neither do the women who were with me. After I was released, a lawyer friend of mine tried her best to present my complaints to Parliament. There was no response. It was a total humiliation.

SANA X AS TOLD TO ARKAN HAMED


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