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DUBROOM
ARTICLE SECTION |
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| Families
live in fear of midnight call by US patrols |
 Despair:
Ghania Hassan says that her eldest son is
being held as a looter for eating a biscuit
given to him by a US soldier
NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine
that they need fear the midnight knock at
the door.
But in recent weeks there have been
increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and
even children being dragged from their homes
at night by American patrols, or snatched
off the streets and taken, hooded and
manacled, to prison camps around the
capital.
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Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among
those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with
no light, or held in overcrowded tents in
temperatures approaching 50C (122F).
On the edge of Baghdad International Airport, US
military commanders have built a tent city that
human rights groups are comparing to the detention
camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another
detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu
Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of
Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years
and never seen again.
Every day, relatives scuff their way along the
dirt track to reach the razor wire barricades
surrounding Abu Ghraib, where they plead in vain
for information about the whereabouts of the
missing.
The response from impassive American sentries is
to point to a sign, scrawled in red felt-tip pen
on a piece of cardboard hanging on the barbed
wire, which says: “No visits are allowed, no
information will be given and you must leave.”
Some, like Ghania Hassan, sink to their knees in
despair. She holds a photograph of her eldest son,
Mohammed Yasim Mohammed, a 22-year-old student.
She said that he was walking through al-Shaab
market with friends when passing troops saw him
eating biscuits from an American military ration
pack and accused him of being a looter. Allegedly
he was pushed face down on the street while his
friends tried to explain how a soldier a couple of
streets away had given them the biscuits.
A month later nothing has been heard of the young
man. His mother showed a fistful of letters and
petitions that she has collected from US
officials, local magistrates and a Muslim cleric,
but she and the rest of the complainants were told
at gunpoint to move away from the prison gates.
Such behaviour merely fuels the growing hostility
between local people and the soldiers they had
welcomed barely three months ago.
Families will naturally protest the innocence of
their relatives, but the accounts, such as that of
Aliah Khadoum, who describes how her son went out
to buy cigarettes on June 1 and was arrested for
breaking curfew, are rarely allowed to be tested
by the local magistrates, who have begun daily
court hearings in the capital.
Elizabeth Hodgkin, of Amnesty International, who
has a bulging case file of arrests, said: “I
cannot believe the Americans are so stupid and
insensitive as to behave like this after all the
trouble they have had over Guantanamo Bay. They
must treat their detainees humanely and let them
have visits from family and lawyers.”
Amnesty claims that 80 minors have been detained,
accused of petty offences including writing
anti-American graffiti or, in the case of two
teenage boys, climbing on the back of a US troop
carrier to hitch a lift through a main street in
Baghdad.
One of the most disturbing incidents concerns
Sufiyan Abd al-Ghani, 11, who was with his uncle
in a car that was stopped near his home in Hay
al-Jihad at just after 10pm on May 27. The boy’s
father heard a commotion and rushed outside to see
him sprawled face down on the road with a rifle
muzzle pressed against his neck and US officers
shouting that someone in the car had shot at them.
Sufiyan was made to stay on the ground for three
hours, while more than 100 soldiers poured into
the neighbourhood, searching houses and cars.
Eventually he was taken away with his hands
trussed behind his back and a hood draped over his
head. No weapon had been found. The boy said that
soldiers dug rifle butts into his neck and back
and that the first night he was handcuffed and
left alone in a tiny room open to the sky.
The following day he was moved to the airport,
where he said for eight days he shared a tent with
22 adults, sleeping on the dirt, with no water to
wash or change his clothes.
Sufiyan said that he was pulled from the tent one
morning, hooded and manacled again, and driven to
Sarhiyeh prison, to be kept in a room with 20
other youths aged 15 or 16 — regarded as minors
by the Geneva Convention.
A woman inmate took his name and details and when
she was released she alerted Sufiyan’s family.
On June 21, the family obtained an injunction from
a judge ordering the boy’s release, but they
were told at the prison that the signature of an
Iraqi judge no longer had legal authority. Even
when an American military lawyer demanded his
freedom, US troops refused to release him until
the lawyer appeared at the prison. Privately US
military lawyers say that they are appalled at how
some of the arrests are being carried out.
At the gates of Abu Ghraib, frustration and anger
force men such as Adnan Akhjan, 38, a former civil
servant, to shout abuse at the US guards.
Mr Akhjan, whose 58-year-old father was arrested
three weeks ago for driving a truck with no doors
or headlights, said: “People are so sickened by
what is happening they talk of wanting Saddam to
come back. How bad can the Americans be that in
three months we want that monster back?”
US officials say that they are struggling to cope
with the continuing looting, as well as attacks on
troops. They say that until the fledgeling Iraqi
police force is fully operational and jails are
repaired, they represent the only law and order.
Each morning at the Red Cross headquarters in
Baghdad there is a silent line of Iraqis queueing
to find out where a relative might be. The
American authorities have said that they will not
inform the Red Cross about detainees until 21 days
after they have been arrested. The International
Committe of the Red Cross has been allowed to see
some of the prisoners, but says that it cannot
even begin to guess at the numbers detained.
An Iraqi exile who had been in Baghdad for only
three days after living in Denmark for the past 27
years found himself caught up in an American swoop
after a shooting in a street market. Not realising
that the man could read English, his interrogator
made no attempt to cover up his case file, which
described him as “suspected assassin”.
The man, who was held for more than 30 days, is
afraid to give his name and says that he is now
considering leaving Baghdad for good.
Shoot to kill, plead academics
Looters in Iraq should be shot and killed,
according to experts working in partnership with
the British Museum (Jack Malvern writes).
Academics from the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, which
has lost 13,000 objects to thieves, said that
force was needed to protect Iraq’s heritage.
Professor Donny George Youkhana, director of
research at the museum, said: “We need armed
helicopter patrols. They will need to shoot to be
effective.”
Professor Elizabeth Stone, from Stony Brook
University, in New York, said that all of Iraq’s
10,000 archaeological sites had been looted. “I
would like to see helicopters flying over there
shooting bullets so that people know there is a
real price to looting this stuff. You’ve got to
kill some people to stop this. It is a major
problem.”
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