[News] Abu Ghraib: An Iraqi Woman's Testimony

[News at freedomarchives.org]

After Abu Ghraib: "I Hate Them"

Huda Alazawi was one of the few women held in solitary in the notorious 
Iraqi prison. Following her release, she talks for the first time to Luke 
Harding about her ordeal

Monday September 20, 2004


<http://www.guardian.co.uk/>The Guardian

It began with a phone call. In November last year 39-year-old Huda Alazawi, 
a wealthy Baghdad businesswoman, received a demand from an Iraqi informant. 
He was working for the Americans in Adhamiya, a Sunni district of Baghdad 
well known for its hostility towards the US occupation. 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. <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = 
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"It was clearly blackmail," Alazawi says, speaking in the Baghdad office of 
her trading company. "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."



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, seen by the Guardian, 
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 Ghraib 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.



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 
Ghraib 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 Ghraib'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 Ghraib, 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 Ghraib 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 Ghraib; 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 Ghraib 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 Ghraib 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 Ghraib 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 Ghraib, 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.



"For a woman in an eastern society to spend months in US custody is very 
difficult," she says. Several of the other former women detainees in Abu 
Ghraib 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 Ghraib. 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 whom she blames for her 
brother's death.



All the other women detainees, meanwhile, have refused to talk about their 
ordeal; she is the first to give testimony. As Iraq lurches from disaster 
to disaster, from kidnapping to suicide bombing, from insurgency towards 
civil war, from death to death, what does she think of the Americans now? 
"I hate them," she says.





The Freedom Archives
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