Captivity (11 page)

While prepared to use force when necessary, his primary interest was in dialogue with the local people and helping Iraqis get back on their
feet. While the soldiers sometimes conducted patrols at night, during the day they were rebuilding local infrastructure. He described with pride how they organized one of the first local elections in Balad. He claimed they had a turnout of between fifty and sixty thousand in a city of ninety thousand. Captain Blake had written a computer program to count the ballots. Balad was a model for the rest of Iraq.

The biggest challenge, he said, was tribal allegiances. “You will constantly fight family ties, tribal ties, in anything you try to do in this country. The only way we’re going to get this thing really fixed is for Iraqis to work with Iraqis.” They had set up a radio station and newspapers, reinforced the local police and established an Iraqi Civilian Defense Corps of about two hundred people to provide rural security. “I’m sort of like a county sheriff,” he said.

Colonel Sassaman held up a newspaper with his picture on the front page. He was bending down next to an Iraqi woman with a lump of raw dough in his hands. “They took this picture when I stopped to bake bread with an Iraqi family,” he said. Thanya, an Iraqi-American woman from Detroit who had fled to the United States to escape the brutality of the Saddam regime, told us Colonel Sassaman was so well liked by Iraqis that the base wasn’t shelled when he was there.

We asked him about house raids and the treatment of detainees. “I’m not in the detainee business,” he said. “We’re really into rebuilding Iraq. I feel really uncomfortable entering someone’s home. We don’t search many homes anymore.” They hadn’t conducted any house raids in several weeks, he said. “During the first few months we were here, we broke down doors and smashed things, and that was really a mistake. There’s been a learning curve, and we know now we can ask for the key. Coming here, we’ve been trained to do only one thing [to kill], so I have to be constantly retraining my soldiers.”

Colonel Sassaman was directly involved in the raids to ensure they were carried out according to the rules. U.S. forces typically took two weeks to “develop their next operation,” and every lead about a potential target was corroborated by two independent sources; they did pay informants, he said. When they had to go into a house, they did it in
“forty-five seconds of absolute fury.” He explained, “You want to make the environment submissive.” They only detained “high-value targets,” those possessing unauthorized weapons or information about the insurgency. He said they didn’t usually handcuff detainees. “That way, if they run, we can use any level of force necessary to control them. Once we cuff ’em, we can’t touch ’em.”

Most of the Iraqis Sassaman detained were released. Those they decided to hold on to were “processed” and held for twenty-four hours, at most two or three days, before being sent on to Abu Ghraib. Only three people were allowed to talk to the detainees while they were in Colonel Sassaman’s custody: Sassaman himself, Captain Blake and Captain Williams.

I liked Nate Sassaman. He was a straight talker who had no time for soft-pedalling platitudes and vague generalities. His desire to improve the lives of the Iraqi people and his frustration with the lack of resources to help him accomplish that task seemed genuine. He appeared to be a man of principle who was doing his very best to carry out an impossible mission with the wrong tools.

We suggested that Colonel Sassaman open a regular channel of communication with the local association of human rights lawyers. The lawyers had a number of concerns about house raids, access to detainees and the misconduct of American soldiers. We asked if the three lawyers, who had been following Thanya’s whispered translation, could have a turn to speak.

As soon as Mohanned began to speak, Sassaman’s smiling, genial demeanour disappeared. He sat erect, hands gripping the arms of his chair, face hard and jaw a line of steel. He looked through the Iraqis, never at them, as if he were sitting in an interrogator’s chair.

Mohanned and Sami talked calmly while Thanya translated. Their concerns were general, about the difficulties of life under occupation. Sassaman clenched his jaw, said he couldn’t do anything about that, he was only interested in specific issues, things he could reasonably change. The lawyers referred to an incident in October 2003 in which U.S. soldiers opened fire on a vehicle containing six Iraqis. The car
burst into flames and one of the passengers ran from the car. The soldiers forced him back inside. All six were killed.

Sassaman’s face went crimson. “That’s been dealt with. Why are you bringing that up? That wasn’t our unit. That was somebody else, but we had to go in and clean up the mess anyway.”

Sassaman turned to us. “You need to understand that these people are Muslim, and their values are not the same as Judeo-Christian values. They aren’t for doing things for other people like we are. They’re only out for themselves.” He seemed to be implying that the lawyers were only interested in financial compensation. Sassaman and Blake told us they’d met every lawyer in town and they didn’t recognize these men, nor had they ever heard of the Organization of Human Rights. “You’re being used,” Colonel Sassaman told us.

We explained that the Organization of Human Rights was a national organization based in Baghdad with which CPT had a long-standing relationship, that the Iraqi men present were legitimate representatives of that organization, and we stated again that our purpose in coming was to try to open a channel of communication between the lawyers and Colonel Sassaman. Sassaman answered, “There’ll be a meeting, all right, and the lawyers will be there. And it’ll be a humdinger of a meeting.” Despite Sassaman’s threatening tone, the lawyers agreed and a date was set for January 17.

As we were leaving, we saw dozens of Iraqi men being held inside a fenced-in area behind the school. A delegation member said, “Didn’t he say they haven’t conducted a house raid in the past few weeks?”

The next day, January 13, 2004, Sami came to visit the CPT apartment in Baghdad with some news. Sassaman had raided Mohanned’s house at four in the morning and had detained Mohanned and five of his brothers. They were released at nine that night. Sassaman said later he had nothing to do with it—another unit was working in his area without his knowledge and detained them in the course of looking for their target. “As soon as I saw him, I let him go.”

I met Sassaman twice more—both times at meetings with the Organization of Human Rights we helped facilitate at the Balad
courthouse. He listened intently, spoke frankly, didn’t promise anything he couldn’t deliver.

Like Colonel Sassaman, Ba’har Kadhin Al Saady once served his country as a soldier. I first met him in the office of the National Association for the Defence of Human Rights (NADHR). It was a cold January day and the building we were in had no windows. He sat on a frayed chair behind a desk propped up by a brick. One hand held a cigarette, the other a pen that twirled in his fingers. You could see in the creases of his face, the set of his jaw, the spartan lines of his body that he’d had a difficult life.

Ba’har had been conscripted into the Republican Army at the age of eighteen. At nineteen he refused a direct military order to join a unit that was attacking Kurdish nationals in northern Iraq. “When they asked me why, I told them those people are Iraqi people, and they are Muslims. If I kill them, God will be angry with me. I do not want to kill anyone. Because of this, I was accused of being a traitor and sent to jail.

“They sent me to the prison of the Fifteenth Division to investigate me. They tortured me too much. They handcuffed me and beat me with sticks.” He pointed to a three-inch scar on his right jawbone. “This is where they beat me with the butt of a pistol.” He pulled up his shirt to show me dozens of long white scars on his back. “They gave us lashes with a cable until they cut the meat.” Ba’har held out his hands. “They poured water on me and then put electricity on my fingers. They hoisted me into the air on a hook for one or two hours with my hands tied behind my back. They call it ‘the scorpion.’ This treatment lasted for three months. On August 13, 1994, they sent me back to my military unit. This mistreatment was staying in my mind so that I couldn’t bear to continue my military service. They asked me to go on patrol again. I had no choice except to be a deserter in order not to make God angry at me.”

Ba’har escaped to a village near Kirkuk in northern Iraq. He stayed there ten days before returning to Baghdad. Ba’har was captured on
October 4. After a series of lashings, he was told he was going to have his ear cut off for desertion.

On October 10, he was taken to a hospital wearing handcuffs and a blindfold. “They gave me an injection in my hand and I lost consciousness. When I woke up, I was in pain. I said to myself, this isn’t real, it’s a nightmare. But when I felt my bandaged ear I knew it wasn’t a dream.”

Ba’har turned his head to show me his right ear. The top of it had been cut flat on a downward angle, as though sliced off by pruning shears. The same punishment was inflicted on over 3,600 war resisters and deserters. Some had their whole ear removed. Others lost the end of their nose, a piece of their tongue, or had a minus sign tattooed on their forehead. “It was just whatever they decided to do,” Ba’har said.

Ba’har spent the next two years in prison, where he was subjected to continuing physical and mental abuse. “There were nineteen soldiers who were exposed to the same treatment. Some of them had little bits of their ear cut, some had big pieces cut.” He was finally released in December 1996.

“At that time, I thought it was the end of my tragedy, but in fact it was just the beginning. Some people, when they gazed at me in the streets, saw me as a bad one. When I was with my friends, they would greet me and say ‘Hello traitor’ as a joke, but in fact that cut me.”

When no one would hire him, Ba’har burned his identification papers and forged new ones that did not record his punishment. Still, marked by his ear, it was impossible to find work. “It became something shameful for me. It affected all my social relationships.

“One day, I asked for the hand of a woman I wanted to marry.” Ba’har’s voice became strained. He fought back tears. “Her family refused. They said yes, you are good, but you are punished by Saddam Hussein. That is not something honourable for us.” Estranged from his family and jobless, Ba’har was living in a looted Ministry of Trade building when he saw posters announcing that the NADHR had a group to assist men in his situation.

“I came to this association at first looking for compensation. I found the people in this society to be very responsible. They helped me.
Meeting the other victims made me eager to volunteer in this organization to work for peace and to work for those who refused wars. So now I like working in this organization and I like my work.” Ba’har became the president of the Committee for the People Who Refused Wars. He spent his days organizing on behalf of the 3,600 men who had been branded by the Saddam regime. He helped them apply for compensation, fill out forms, get assistance from the Ministry of Work and Social Affairs, and he listened to their stories. The Ministry of Health had recently agreed to offer surgery. Fourteen auricular reconstructions had been done.

“Before the war, I was humiliated, scorned,” Ba’har said. “So now in fact it is not a disgrace, it is not shameful for me.” He pointed to his ear. “Now I consider this cut a medal of honour for resisting the strongest dictator ever known.”

I asked him to tell me more about how—and why—he made his extraordinary decision to refuse war. He paused, struggled to find the words. “It is … a … primitive feeling in me.” He did not have language for what he wanted to say. “I am the peaceful man … I don’t like to shed the blood of others. I wish to live in peace, and to realize peace all over the world.”

I asked him if he wanted to have his own ear reconstructed. He nodded. “Yes, I want to do that. But only after everyone else gets it done.” And then he said, “In spite of my poverty, I want to help others who are in need. Until now I am living in a garden.”

I thank God for you, Ba’har. You, and those like you, are the shock absorbers of history. You have set your face like flint against the war machine. Your
no
is the only sharp-edged sword, the only polished arrow that can deliver us from the blind, mad spiral of violence. By your shame we have the possibility of wholeness, by your affliction the possibility of healing. The punishment you accept brings us peace. You are one of the suffering servants of the Lord, all that is holding the world together.

–

As the day of my departure neared, I found myself becoming increasingly skittish. It was early March 2004, just a few weeks before the kidnapping of internationals began. We were right in the middle of our Adopt-a-Detainee Campaign and its daily public vigils in Tahrir Square. I was finding it harder and harder to leave the apartment. The normal everyday code-yellow readiness that’s so essential for negotiating the perils of life in Iraq—a strange car parked in front of your building, gunshots up the street, a car full of glaring men pulling up next to you—was building into a paralyzing anxiety. When I mentioned this to Cliff, a veteran of fourteen years of working on CPT projects, he reassured me that this was completely normal. “I always get more cautious as the time gets closer for me to go home. Okay, I think to myself, I’m almost there, I’m going to make it back alive this time. Soldiers talk about feeling that too. It’s the horse smelling the barn syndrome.”

On March 12, 2004, I said goodbye to the team and one of our translators took me to the bus station. I sat down in my seat and let go a sigh of relief. I had made it. Except, somewhere between Ramadi and Fallujah, on the highway leading west to Jordan, the bus suddenly stopped in the middle of the desert. People sat up and looked out of windows. There were five cars in front of us and, two hundred metres ahead of them, five Humvees straddling the divided highway in a semicircle. Three more Humvees were parked on the left shoulder.

A handful of people got off the bus. I decided to get out too. I could see more clearly what was happening. There were soldiers lying on the ground in firing positions behind the wheels of the Humvees, hyper-charged, afraid, their bodies coiled and ready to kill. A lone soldier stood on the road in front of the Humvees, one hand signalling us to stay back, the other ready on the trigger of his machine gun.