CPT Iraq - Human Rights Testimonies
[On June 26, 2004, Sheila Provencher and Greg Rollins met Hisham Jamal Dwaik at the Iraqi Human Rights Watch office in Kerbala. This is his testimoy.]
On Tuesday, August 26, 2003, Hisham, his uncle Atta Mohammed (Name changed), four men from Iran, and the Iraqi driver of the car they rented, were on their way from Kerbala to visit shrines in Samarra, a town north of Baghdad. Atta, originally from Iraq, had fled from Saddam to Iran many years before. He had not been to the shrines for years. Hisham pointed out that it was normal for Shi’a Muslims to visit the holy shrines in Najaf, Kerbala, and Samarra.
On the outskirts of Samarra, as they crossed a bridge, they stopped to take video footage of the good view of the city with the shrines and nearby river. Beyond their position on the bridge was a U.S. army checkpoint. Cars were passing through it but the soldiers stopped their car and ordered them to turn off the engine and get out of the car. Soldiers searched the car and found two cameras: the video camera and a still camera. Soldiers took the videocamera to a tank at the checkpoint and had one of the soldiers in the tank watch the footage to see if there was anything on it that compromised security. Hisham and his friends waited for about an hour and fifteen minutes in the sun while the soldier went through the tape. Hisham said it was about a two-hour tape.
Hisham speaks some English, and told the soldiers that he and his friends had just been taping the shrines and landscape. He told the soldiers to keep the tape or even to keep both the cameras, but please just to let them go.
When the soldiers finished with the tape, two hummers with U.S. and Iraqi soldiers came to the checkpoint. Soldiers tied Hisham’s hands behind his back, as well as his uncle’s and his friends’ hands behind their backs, and put them back in their car. Escorted between the two hummers, an Iraqi drove them and their car to a local military base. While they drove, they asked the Iraqi what would happen to them. He told them not to worry; the U.S. army would hold them twenty to thirty days and then release them. The owner of the car asked what would happen to his car. The Iraq said the army would take care of it.
At the local base (a police station occupied by U.S. soldiers), U.S. soldiers made them stand and face a wall for half an hour. A U.S. officer then took them for questioning one by one. When Hisham went, the officer had an Arabic translator, but Hisham was not sure where the translator was from (he guessed Lebanon or Egypt). There was a female U.S. soldier taking notes. The questions were standard questions: name, age, what are you doing in the area, who are you with, did you work for the old regime? Hisham told them he was a student, and not old enough to work for the old regime or to be in the army yet. The female officer measured his height, and searched him. She took all his belongings (prayer beads, wristwatch, keys, money, and I.D.), put them in a bag, and wrote his name on it. A tall soldier then took Hisham by the collar and led him "the long way" to a prison cell in an adjacent room. Hisham said, "I knew there was an easy way through a door, but he took me in complicated ways to confuse me."
This base had many cells, each with many Iraqi citizens in them. Soldiers place Hisham in a cell with two others from his group. Three additional Iraqi people were in the cell with them. Hisham asked the two from his group what had happened to them, and they described a similar routine of questioning. When the questioning was done, soldiers gathered all seven of the men together in one cell, along with the three other Iraqis who had been there for twenty to thirty days. Soldiers fed them that night at around 6:00 pm. Because they did not recognize anything in the meal packet, they only ate the biscuits and jam.
Reflecting on this experience, Hisham said, "These were very hard times for us. We suffered from terror and fear – it was the first time we had been in a situation like this. We were afraid especially because we did not know the reason for our being here. There was no one to help us. We tried our best to coorperate, and we asked questions about why were here. But they would just say ‘Shut up! Shut up!’ And if we repeated our question, they got upset and very angry."
The next afternoon (Wednesday 27) at 12:00pm, they same officer from the previous day had them all brought to his desk. For half an hour, he said nothing but looked them up and down. They asked him if they would go home. He said "maybe". At the end of half an hour, the officer and some other soldiers talked about what they should do with Hisham and his friends. Through his limited English, Hisham understood the soldiers wanted to move them. Several soldiers came with rope and tied the detainees’ hands behind their backs, searched their pockets again, lined them up and shouted at them to go out to a truck outside.
Soldiers took Hisham and the others, in a covered truck, to another U.S. base. Hisham did not know what base it was or from where they came. He said that they were taken a 10-minute drive along a dusty road. Hisham and his friends then sat in the truck for an hour. They were covered from the sun but still hot. They asked one of the U.S. soldiers guarding them what would happen to them. He said at 5:00pm, they would be taken to Guantanamo Bay. Concerned, Hisham asked the guard if he was sure. Hisham then asked the other guard who said the same thing. At 5:00pm, the truck drove to a helicopter pad. The two guards placed them in the helicopter and got in themselves. When he saw the guards putting on seatbelts, Hisham asked for seatbelts too, but the guards refused. The flight took about fifteen minutes. While they flew, one soldier asked Hisham to look out the window and commented on the beautiful scenery below. After a while, the guard told Hisham not to look out the window any more.
When the helicopter landed, the guards placed them in another truck, drove them to a location and took them out. The guards placed them on their knees and left them there for three hours. Hisham and his friends kept asking where they were. They only learned later, from other prisoners, that they were at Abu Ghraib prison.
They spent the night in a tent with four guards. In the morning, guards took them one by one to be processed in an office full of computers. They had their eyes scanned. They were given I.D. bracelets, and the Iranians were hooded. They were all questioned. Guards put Hisham and the Iraqi driver in a tent in a heavy security camp for supporters of Saddam. Four days later Hisham’s uncle and the Iranians joined them in the tent. They said they had each spent the four days in one-meter by one-meter cells.
The six men spent an additional twenty days in heavy security before prison guards moved them to a light security camp for criminal detainees. Hisham does not know the name of either of the camps in which he was placed. They were detained for a total of 3 months and 2 weeks.
Guards told Hisham and his friends they were being held because they videotaped coalition forces when they had been filming the city of Samarra from the bridge. While in Abu Ghraib, none of them were beaten or verbally abused while detained. They did not witness anyone being beaten or abused either, although they did talk to people who claimed to have been beaten and saw many bruises and injuries. Hisham said, "We could see signs of torture on other detainees – black eyes and bruised legs." One man they talked to said he had been bitten in the thigh by a security dog. Another man said guards hung him from the ceiling for several days until his shoulders dislodged. Hisham also said the camps had "Tarzans," detainees who had been captured in their underwear in house raid and not given additional clothing to wear.
Guards gave detainees two meals per day. At first the food was from the U.S. Sometimes during Hisham’s stay, the prison changed food contractors to an Iraqi company who served them Iraqi food, which Hisham said was of poor quality. During Ramadan, Hisham said that the prison shifted the times for meals to accommodate the fast.
Hisham and his friends never received visits from family. He said his family did not know where he was until he was moved into the light security camp. He was able to send his family a letter through the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC), but he only saw the ICRC once. They came one morning from 8:00 to 12:00 pm, and took cases from detainees, including Hisham’s.
On Friday, December 10, 2003, prison guards called the numbers of detainees to be released. Hisham heard their numbers called. It took guards five hours to process them for release. The prison gave back personal belongings taken away from detainees when they entered Abu Ghraib, but because they had there belongings taken from them at the base near Samarra, they did not get anything back. This included money, and the cameras. The driver did eventually get his car back, as his family from Kerbala picked up the car a month after the group was arrested.
Hisham gave CPT permission to publish his story, but he does not want to use his real name. He is afraid that if he publicizes his story, the Coalition Forces will detain him again.