I Lost My Love in Baghdad

by Michael Hastings

  I wrote my first story about the civil war a week before the Samarra mosque bombing. An Iraqi police officer I interviewed described the torture that was going on at the prison he worked at, called Al-Hakimiya. The officer, who told me to refer to him in print as Mahmoud, said the Shiite police force was detaining and torturing its prisoners, mostly Sunnis. He said the jail was corrupt, nasty. Prisoners would have to pay a forty-dollar bribe to make a cell phone call; to get released, wealthy Sunnis would be charged $30,000 or $40,000. “I saw by my own eyes, cables to the ears and operating the electric shock equipment,” Mahmoud told me. “I’ve seen prisoners without toes or fingernails.” He said the guards would sell painkillers to the prisoners after they were done abusing them. He said he tried to tell American soldiers what was going on when they stopped by, but the response he got was, “We are only here to support you.”

  The accusations of one unnamed Iraqi police officer weren’t strong enough to publish without corroboration. To back it up, I talked to four Iraqi defense lawyers who described similar abuses at Al-Hakimiya and other prisons run by the Ministry of Interior. Reports from the U.N. and other human rights groups depicted the same pattern: the Iraqi police illegally detaining and abusing men without cause. I called up the man in charge of Al-Hakimiya prison, Brigadier General Sadoon of the Iraqi police’s Major Crimes Unit, to get a comment. Unsurprisingly, he denied the human rights violations.

  “I’ve heard there is torture going on at your prison,” I told him over the phone.

  “Not at all,” Brigadier General Sadoon responded. “Come see for yourself.”

  Sadoon gave me the number of his American military advisor, who agreed to pick me up in the Green Zone and take me on a tour of the prison so I could see for myself that there was no finger pulling or electric shock treatment at Al-Hakimiya. On a sunny day in early February, a convoy of Humvees picked me up and took me to the jail in Baghdad.

  Al-Hakimiya was a dark gray five-story rectangular building that squatted, unassumingly, a hundred yards back from the city street. The prison was famous for its dark history. During Saddam’s time, it was run by the mukhbarat, or secret police. Saddam’s political enemies and other suspects of the regime were kept inside. Prisoners who survived their stay had a name for the interrogation cells—they called them “operating rooms.”

  We parked the Humvees in the large courtyard outside the jail. A few blue and white Iraqi police pickup trucks were parked by the entrance; other police officers watched the street from a machine gun tower.

  As we walked up the front steps of the building, the American advisor looked at me and said: “Have you had all your shots?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Good. The sewage isn’t working in this place. It’s dripping down from the top floor. It’s the biggest shithole in Iraq,” he said. “Literally.”

  I waited for Brigadier General Sadoon in a small room outside his office on the first floor. His personal assistant, a police detective, sat behind a desk. He looked like he was about six feet and 230 pounds. His black hair was buzz cut, the sides of his head bare, a small scar on his thick brown neck. I tried to ask him a few questions, using the Kuwaiti interpreter assigned to the American advisor, but the detective would not give his name; he would not say anything. He stared at me. His eyes had seen bad things; he had done bad things. Or so I imagined. The interpreter suggested he might not want to talk.

  Brigadier General Sadoon was more personable. He had the look of a smooth undercover cop. He was a fit thirty-something and wore a mustache and lightly combed hair, dressed in plain clothes, and sported a brown leather jacket. He called us into his office and spoke at length about how there may have been past abuses at the prison, before he was in command, but he assured me that nothing like that was going on now. He showed me where he slept when he had to spend the night at his office—there was a bedroom attached to it, with a queen-sized bed and television set. He told me I could interview as many prisoners as I wanted. He then introduced me to the warden, a short man with a large gut named Omar, who would take us on the tour.

  The prisoners were kept on the fifth floor. We climbed up a damp stairwell that smelled of human waste. The fifth floor looked like an apocalyptic dormitory, a dark stone hallway with about five large rooms crammed with dozens of floor mats, bedrolls, and bunk beds. At the end of the hall, a door opened out onto a room with bars for a ceiling, an open-air cage with no windows, only sunlight pouring in from above. This was the room where the prisoners could get a breath of fresh air, which cost each prisoner, according to Mahmoud, fifteen dollars. It was packed with thirty black men who were sitting, standing, jostling for space. Omar explained that the men were Africans, from Sudan. He told me they were being kept on immigration violations, picked up during a raid on a Sudanese neighborhood in Baghdad. A few pleaded for my help. I gave out cigarettes as I asked questions and took down names. I tried not to make any promises. “I’m here to tell your stories, I’m here to tell your stories,” I repeated.

  The Sudanese prisoners told me they were being treated great.

  Omar smiled. “See, they are all treated well here,” he said.

  I didn’t know what to make of it. What were thirty Sudanese doing in an Iraqi jail?

  We walked back down the hall. I stopped in the largest cell. The prisoners shouted out to me: “No torture,” they said. “Not here.” I didn’t see any visible signs of abuse. But three prisoners told me they had been tortured at other prisons on the way to Al-Hakimiya. An older man from Mosul pointed at two teenagers—he said they were brothers, eighteen and nineteen years of age. In Mosul, he said, the police forced them to have sex with each other. Omar the warden warned me to not go too far into the room: “The prisoners could take you hostage.” I looked in the next cell. A man with a sweaty face and deranged eyes pressed his face up to the small metal square in the door. I asked him what he was in for. He stared at my interpreter and responded: “Beheading Kuwaiti translators and killing journalists.” My interpreter told me he was just fucking with us, but he wasn’t stretching the truth too far. This prisoner was accused of kidnapping and murdering a European, Omar told me.

  At the end of the hallway was another cell. A group of eighteen Iraqi police officers sat cross-legged behind black metal bars.

  “Are these cops under arrest?” I asked.

  Omar gave me the rundown.

  “They had a confrontation with the Iraqi National Guard,” he said. “The ING said they were doing work outside of their jurisdiction.” The eighteen police were highway patrolmen who had been detained on January 20 when they were stopped at a checkpoint in Baghdad after arresting a prisoner of their own. The man the cops had detained, Omar said, had been wanted by the Americans. The ING wanted to impress their American colleagues, so they decided to take the suspect—and arrest all the cops.

  One of the detained police officers stood up. Omar opened the gate to let him speak.

  “They wanted our prisoner, and when we refused to give him to them right away, they arrested us,” said the cop, Ma’an Hadi. “They took our five cars and they beat the crap out of us.” Hadi said he and the other policemen were from the south, near Nassiriya.

  Ten minutes later, back on the ground floor of the detention facility, the American advisor explained that the eighteen cops had been “doing what they shouldn’t be doing.”

  I pressed him for details, but he told me there was an “ongoing investigation” and he didn’t want to comment.

  I honestly didn’t know what to make of the entire scene. Thirty Sudanese, eighteen Iraqi police officers, possible torture, possible abuse. What else did I expect to find in an Iraqi jail besides the utterly bizarre? But where was the news here, where was the story?

  Two weeks after my visit to the prison, the results of that “ongoing investigation” were published in an article in theChicago Tribune . General Joseph Peterson said the U.S. had captured its first “death squad.” This was the first time
a high-ranking military official had used the term. According to the story, the arrest had occurred in January, and there had been twenty-two members of this death squad. Four of the death squad members were being detained by the Americans at Abu Ghraib, and the other eighteen were being held in Iraqi custody. All were members of the Iraqi police highway patrol.

  Eighteen Iraqi police. Detained in January. Being held at an Iraqi jail.

  Hunh.

  I had what looked like the first interview with an Iraqi death squad.

  Those eighteen souls, who sat dejectedly on the stone floor, thin, ragged, mustached, in their sagging blue uniforms, those eighteen pathetic-looking people at Al-Hakimiya were a death squad. They didn’t look like a death squad.

  Startling revelation about war #1036: the sheer ordinariness of killers. Death squads are normal people. Death squads are neighbors. Death squads are regular guys who have been given a grim wartime label to describe what was becoming an all too common occurrence. Better to say “death squad” than to say “eighteen Iraqis holding regular jobs who go around in packs at night to kill other Iraqis who hold regular jobs.”

  After theTribune broke the story, I told my editors that I had a story on death squads, an exclusive. “I think I talked to members in a death squad,” I said, describing my day in Al-Hakimiya. The story ran with the headline “The Death Squad Wars.” I wrote how death squads were now being used by both Sunnis and Shiites, a dirty war of execution lists and brutal interrogation rooms, a war being fought just out of view of the Americans.

  The story came out on a Monday. On Wednesday, February 22, the Al-Askari Mosque in Samarra, also called the Golden Mosque, was bombed. The mosque was considered one of the most important shrines for Shiites in Iraq. Sunni insurgents, likely from Al Qaeda in Iraq, were believed to be behind the bombing. Though no one was killed in the bombing, the mosque’s famous golden dome was completely wrecked. The country’s still pent-up ethnic tensions were unleashed, causing the war to descend into a Hobbesian nightmare.

  I rushed to get an embed to cover the widespread fighting. I hooked up with an infantry unit from the 10th Mountain Division who were stationed in Baghdad.

  Their mission was to travel the city and take digital photographs of mosques in an attempt to confirm (or, ideally, deny) that mosques were being attacked. I saw the email with the soldiers’ orders, which read: “Take digital photos of the mosques that were reported as damaged [and] positively confirm or deny the reports…Each picture must clearly show that the mosque has sustained damage or that there is clearly no damage to the structure. When possible pictures or videos should be taken from multiple angles…Do not enter mosques to take pictures.” This was not a joke. Their mission was to take digital snapshots of mosques.

  It was part of the military’s larger strategy of the week. In the aftermath of the Samarra bombing, the media was reporting claims from Iraqi political parties saying that over two hundred mosques had been attacked and hundreds, if not thousands, of people had been killed. Since the Golden Mosque was a Shiite shrine attacked by Sunnis, the Shiites were now attacking Sunni shrines, a tit-for-tat battle targeting each other’s places of worship. Despite what was obvious to me and other journalists on the ground, the military continued to counter the claims of civil war, announcing that the number of mosque attacks was being greatly exaggerated by Iraqi politicians. That was the official position, and that’s why I found myself driving around Baghdad with Captain Greg Stone from Potsdam, New York, as he took pictures of mosques.

  Captain Stone and I were both around the same age, and from the same region of New York—the North Country, the rural-poor part of the state only miles away from the Canadian border, a place that used to be built around farming but now depended on the growing prison industry. I grew up in Malone, New York, a thirty-minute drive from Potsdam. These shared biographical facts took on a strange significance for me. How could two guys from Malone and Potsdam become bit players in a drama unfolding in a hostile foreign capital? It definitely gave me a darkly comic feeling that somewhere along the way in arriving at this moment in history some very bad decisions must have been made by someone or something.

  We went out on Saturday morning. Stone’s patrol of three Humvees moved through the city, emptied of traffic. We started in the overcrowded Shiite slum of Shula. As we rolled down the narrow streets, the tall antennas on the Humvees hit the low-hanging power lines—in poor neighborhoods, the thin multicolored wires had been set up by the locals in a chaotic, jerry-rigged fashion to siphon electricity from the city’s struggling power grid. Each snag, causing the wires to bounce like rubber bands in the convoy’s wake, caught the attention of the Iraqis watching us pass by: Would they be out of power, would they be able to fix their wires? Or would it survive the vehicles? The Humvees’ loudspeakers blared a message, read by an Iraqi interpreter: “Attention, attention, the Iraqi government has a curfew for your safety until 4P.M. …From four to eight, you may go to prayer…The president of Iraq urges calm. Thank you for your attention.” We stopped to talk to an Iraqi soldier manning a checkpoint. He told us that two people in his area had been killed the night before, and four young men were kidnapped and executed “just thirty minutes ago.” I took notes.

  “In this neighborhood, that’s a regular day,” Captain Stone said.

  By midafternoon, we got around to looking for mosques.

  Captain Stone had a list of thirteen mosques he was supposed to inspect. Seven of the mosques were in his sector; the other six weren’t. He had grid coordinates and names for some of them. The grids did not seem to match with names. The names did not seem to match with the mosques. We drove around the rest of the day, trying to find the right mosques. The soldiers in Captain Stone’s patrol repeated a series of increasingly confused questions: Do we know what mosque this is? Are we sure it’s in our sector? Is it a Sunni or Shia mosque? How can you tell again? A black banner means Shiite, right? Are you tracking?

  They found a burning tire at a Sunni mosque. It had been thrown over the side of the courtyard wall by someone. “Does that count as a mosque attack?” a soldier asked. “I don’t know, but let’s get a picture of it,” Captain Stone replied.

  How do we know when those bullet holes in the wall were made? How do we know the people we’re talking to at the mosques are telling us the truth? That mosque looks okay, but are we really sure? What the fuck over.

  We drove in circles. We got lost. We figured out where we were. We found mosques. Stone wasn’t a hundred percent sure they were the right mosques, but in his sector seven mosques needed to be found and photographed and by the end of the day seven mosques had been found and photographed.

  We drove back to Camp Victory. I sat down in my trailer and started to write. I needed to check the spelling of Captain Stone’s first name—was it Greg or Gregory or did I totally misremember it and it was something else? I went into the 10th Mountain’s TOC, the tactical operations center, and something was not right.

  It was 2A.M. , and I sat in a small waiting area looking at a row of pictures of American men and women up on the wall, with the dates of when they were killed under their names, when I overheard a major on the phone saying, it wasn’t good, that the IED had killed two, get the chaplain. His voice carried down the hall and the sound of it chilled me. Two Americans had been killed outside that mosque with the burning tire, where we had just been a few hours earlier. Two men whose names I didn’t know, who died on a patrol I could have just as easily been on. The chaplain walked past me, a Korean-American man wearing PT gear, and I asked to talk to him. “Not now, now I need to go pray,” he said. I walked down the hallway and found the office of the major whose voice I’d heard. His face was gray, so gray with the news that two of his boys had just been blown up, and that meant a ceremony and letters home and empty boots and two more pictures on the wall of the TOC. “It was bad,” he told me. “It was a big one.” Big enough to kill two, the shrapnel blowing the back of one of the soldier
s’ heads right off.

  I went back to my trailer and filed the story about the outbreak of civil war, including a quote from an American State Department official I interviewed. It wasn’t a civil war, the official said, but the Iraqis had “looked into the abyss” and recoiled in horror. It was the first time I had heard the abyss quote, but over the next few weeks it would be repeated by those in higher office, until it became a talking point a month later for President Bush—“They looked into the abyss and did not like what they saw.” This Samarra bombing showed the Iraqis and their government what a civil war would look like, claimed the officials. Not that they are in one. But it would look like this. The Iraqis, the U.S. government claimed, were scared straight.

  The abyss. They looked into the abyss and they learned a valuable lesson.

  I am standing outside my trailer in Camp Victory. I haven’t slept in twenty-four hours. It is approaching 4A.M. I have a satellite phone in one hand and my T-Mobile in the other, my laptop is balanced on a concrete duck-and-cover bunker. I keep the thin white door to the trailer open a crack so the light from the stale room shines a few feet outside, allowing me to see what I am doing. I am waiting to check my email a final time to make sure the story closed with no errors. I am supposed to do a telephone interview with Fox News in an hour,On the Record with Greta Van Susteren, to discuss what is happening on the ground in Iraq. I am making phone calls back to the States.