The Iraq memory Foundation is a non-governmental group that was established by a number of Iraqi former exiles to document more than 35 years of miseries Iraq and the Iraqis had lived under the rule of the Baath party and Saddam Hussein. One of the projects this foundation is working on is to document testimonies of Iraqis who have suffered torture or lost relatives to the brutal regime of Hussein. I have got a pack of five DVDs telling stories of about 40 Iraqis. Here, I will tell some of these stories to participate in telling the world our dark history of more than three decades.

Who Is Left In Iraq?


After the 1972 Iraqi-oil-revolution, many foreign companies started to fly into Iraq to reserve a space for the soon-to-flourish third world country. Oil companies and investors fought their way into the newly born economic sector in here. According to the Iraqi law, companies have to have Iraqi lawyers to supervise their work and help in the paperwork. But the baath party wouldn’t, of course, let the companies work freely. They had to know everything!

Khalid Esa Taha, a well known Iraqi lawyer at the time, was a British company’s lawyer. The company was called William Press. His job was to monitor and supervise the legality of the company’s work and make sure nothing was against the rules of the Baathist Iraq. As part of his job, he had to endure the harassments of Saddam Hussein’s henchmen and intelligence officers. The intelligence asked Taha to accept employing one of their minders in his office to spy on his work and the foreign companies that might contact him. And to keep his job, he had accepted to allow one of them to be handyman or waiter in the office.

Taha said that the minder’s job was to enter the room without permission whenever Taha had a meeting with a customer or a meeting. “He used to enter the room 20 time serving coffee,” Taha said and laughed when he recalled the scene.

A few months later, Taha said, the minister of trade in the 1970s, who was a friend of Taha’s, offered him a high-rank job in the government. A job that Taha later refused because he didn’t want to be involved in a Baathist government. The minister visited Taha five times offering the job, Taha said. But the answer was always “No.”

“They are going to be upset. You know what that means!” the minister said to Taha about the government officials the last time he visited. “I will go back to prison,” Taha answered. Given the sensitivity of his job, Taha was taken to the Mukhabarat [civil intelligence] building several times for interrogation.

In a chit-chat gathering, a friend of Taha’s once told him that he might be threatened. That the government might put him in jail because he worked for foreign companies and refused to work in the government.

“They wouldn’t say you are a political prisoner,” Tahas’s friend told him. “It’s either a sodomite or a thief,” he told him the accusation would be. Taha said that it was true. He said he heard that Abu Ghraib prison had housed many political prisoners, but the charges were either sodomy or thievery. He recalled a man who he named as Nasrat Abdul Karim, who opposed the baathist government in the 1970s and was assassinated. The rumor the security forces spread at the time was that Karim was gay and his partner killed him.

The government killed opposition members, but never thought that would be enough. It was common that they would destroy the reputation of their victims so that their families would suffer after the also. They even were afraid of the opposition members after they died. My uncle was an influential figure in the Iraqi opposition until he died in the 1990s. Hussein didn’t allow his remains to be buried in Iraq although the family requested that. He feared the opposition members and their ghosts!

In 1979, Taha, the lawyer who was in his early 50s at the time, was arrested and detained at the Mukhabarat prison. He never knew why, but knew the charges.

When he arrived to the detention facility, he was given a pair of pajamas. Taha is fat! The pajamas were tight. When he told the guard that he couldn’t put on the pajamas, the guard laughed and said “they are small now. they will be big on you. Wait. We will put you in a diet program,” and left.

When they took off his blindfold, he found himself in a red room with only one tiny bulb and no windows. He said that later that night he heard voices of women weeping and crying. The guards were raping them. He kept hearing these horrible voices for 119 nights.

Taha recalled how he saw men being forced to sit on beer bottles. “Blood would pour from their bottoms and the guards would push them further down so the bottle would go deep inside,” he said. Taha himself was beaten three times a week the entire time he was there. But he didn’t know why. He remembered a journalist who was detained with him but had already spent two years in captivity. Taha said that the guards would take the journalist and ask him to sling himself on a four-meter-high stairwell and start beating his bottom for hours. If the journalist loose his hands, Taha said, he would fall and die.

“Loose your hands and die. Fuck them,” Taha said he always thought when he saw the scene. “Fall and die. It’s much dignifying than enduring this torture,” he insisted.

119 days later, Taha and other detainees were taken to appear before a judge. Three detainees were taken into the judge’s room before Taha an spent seven minutes, he said, to come out sentenced to death. They came out crying, he said.

When Taha was taken into the room, the judge asked him if he were beaten or disrespected. “The guard had already told me ‘if you say we have beaten you, I will kill you before the judge’ ” Taha said. So he told the judge that he was respected during the whole time!

Taha was sentenced to six years in prison and all his assets to be confiscated. The charge was that he had deals and suspicious contacts with foreign companies.

Taha didn’t tell what happened after that. He doesn’t tell if he served the sentence or escaped or was freed by an amnesty. He recalls the time of his captivity bitterly. He calls is a “horrible period.”

“It is hard to imagine how a human being could oppress his brother this way,” he said. “Even the animals. The lion kills a prey. But when he is full, he leaves it. But here, they don’t become full. They like blood and torture and smile when the victim dies.”

Taha couldn’t stay in a country, where his dignity was destroyed and stolen. As many other Iraqi intellectuals. He fled Iraq. A country that leads its educated people and patriots to the doorstep and ask them to leave and keep the vulgar to continue tear it a part. A country that never welcomed its own people and will never do!

The Iraq memory Foundation is a non-governmental group that was established by a number of Iraqi former exiles to document more than 35 years of miseries Iraq and the Iraqis had lived under the rule of the Baath party and Saddam Hussein. One of the projects this foundation is working on is to document testimonies of Iraqis who have suffered torture or lost relatives to the brutal regime of Hussein. I have got a pack of five DVDs telling stories of about 40 Iraqis. Here, I will tell some of these stories to participate in telling the world our dark history of more than three decades.


Saddam Hussein’s regime feared a six-month-old infant!

In 1988, Saddam Hussein’s government launched a campaign against the Kurds in northern Iraq. Many dozens of thousands of Kurds were arrested and put into jails and were tortured. Thousands were killed in what was known as al-Anfal operations. The main goal for these operations was to continue the former regime’s government’s anti-Kurdish cleansing.

Asmar Rahman Qadir is a Kurd from Sulaimaniya. She was one of those who witnessed Anfal and survived the horrific circumstances during her captivity.

In April 1988, a force from the former ministry of interior’s commando unit came into Qadir’s house and arrested Qadir and her four children, including a six-month-old infant. From her house, she was taken directly to a detention facility called Tob Zawa in the north. There, Qadir realized that she wasn’t the only woman with children. There were more than 100 children in the cell she was in with their mothers, she said.

“They took my children and tortured them,” Qadir recalled. Even the four-year old. “When they came back, they were covered with blood and mud.” Qadir spoke in Kurdish language and a scroll at the bottom of the screen translated her story.

Qadir recalled how one day and suddenly a group of commandos came into the cell and ordered all the children out. “The children’s weeping and shouting shook the skies,” she said. They took the children and “we didn’t know where they went,” Qadir said with a tough tone. She is not weak. Her voice tells about her. The mothers tried to prevent the soldiers from taking the children, but they were many and all armed. Qadir’s daughter cried as a soldier dragged her on the floor. She looked at her mother’s opened and shocked eyes thinking the mother would use her super-mom-power and help her. “Go,” Qadir told her daughter, “your fate is the same as those children’s.” Five hours of weeping and ugly predictions. Children were taken by the commandos from a cell, what are the possibilities?!

“I said ‘this is a test and we have to face it’ “ Qadir said. Her husband always told her that “life has the sweat and the bitter,” and that was her mantra in life and prison. “That was the secret for the strength I’ve got to survive the catastrophe,” she told the interviewer.

Anfal operations case is the next charge Saddam Hussein will appear before a judge for. The Iraqi judiciary has finished the investigations in the case and is supposed to present the dossier to the court soon. A number of Hussein’s henchmen are believed to be involved in the massacre of Anfal and will appear with him before the judge to face charges.

“I suddenly heard my children shouting,” Qadir, the 41-year-old mother said, “I thought I was dreaming.” Five hours later, the children came back and told the story. Soldiers took them to the backyard and forced them to sit under no roof when it was raining while the torturers enjoyed beating their young bodies. They were tortured like if they were matures, Qadir said. “What have the children done to deserve the torture,” she wondered 18 years later while telling the story. Some of the mothers don’t know where their children are until now, she said.

On day, at dawn, Qadir and her cellmates woke up on the sounds of weeping mother and children in other cells. Through the small window in their cell, Qadir and the others saw a group of detainees being forced into buses. Later, Qadir heard that they were taken to other detention facilities in the south, in Tikrit, Nugrat al-Salman and Arar.

“People wished that their missing children were dead,” Qadir bitterly said. “At least they attend their funerals and know where they are buried so they can forget.”

“It is very sad not to know what is your fate and wait for death to come,” Qadir said to end her story.

NOTE: I am sorry for the delay in writing this post. I had to reset my life lately to survive!

The Iraq memory Foundation is a non-governmental group that was established by a number of Iraqi former exiles to document more than 35 years of miseries Iraq and the Iraqis had lived under the rule of the Baath party and Saddam Hussein. One of the projects this foundation is working on is to document testimonies of Iraqis who have suffered torture or lost relatives to the brutal regime of Hussein. I have got a pack of five DVDs telling stories of about 40 Iraqis. Here, I will tell some of these stories to participate in telling the world our dark history of more than three decades.

Thirty Six Years Have Passed, But Still Unable to Sleep Peacefully!


“I lost the flower of my youth,” that’s how Sabeeh Shami al-Zehairi started telling his story. “I lost my health. I lost my sight. I lost my kidney. I lost my family.”

When the Baathist regime got into power in Iraq, it wiped out any possible future resistance. Baathists killed all other parties’ members, especially the communists. And later on, victimized Dawa party members who, influenced by Iran, rose against the baathist regime in Iraq in the 1970s.

Zehairi, a worker at a gas station, was a communist. An Iraqi, who believed in the ideologies of a party that called, from the outside, for equality and even shares of a country’s wealth among the people. In a country like Iraq, where people never witnessed equality or enjoyed their wealth and resources, the communist party was favored among the poorest, like Zehairi, a Sabian born in southern Iraq to a poor family of farmers.

In 1968, a few years after the baathists took over the rule in the country and started to murder its people, Zehairi escaped an assassination attempt. A man came into the gas station, where Zehairi worked, and called his name.

“We don’t have communism anymore,” the man said “We have come. Take it,” the stranger yelled as he shot a bullet off his pistol. Zehairi survived when the bullet lost its target and hit the sky. Terrified by the crowed he attracted, the stranger escaped the scene leaving Zehairi shocked and speechless. When Zehairi later that day appealed to his bosses for protection, they turned him back blaming him for being a communist.

“Why are you a communist? We have warned you not to be,” Zehairi, sarcastically, recalled his bosses as telling him.

In 1970, security officers came to where Zehairi worked and arrested him. Blindfolded and handcuffed to the back, Zehairi was taken to Qasr al-Nihaya [Palace of the End.] The palace was built in the monarchy era for the king. It was originally called al-Rihab Palace. But when the baathists took over, they used the palace as a detention facility and a stage for the executions of the communists. “His life has ended, he who enters it,” Zehairi explained the meaning of the new name of the building.

The first night, they asked Zehairi to confess. To confess what an organization Zehairi is a member of. He told them that he is not a member of any organization.

“I have an ideology. I am not a member of an organization,” he recalls telling the investigators. “If you want, I can tell you about my ideology. They are in books.” The investigators didn’t like his answer. So, “take him,” one of them yelled.

A room with many torturing machines, people soaked in their blood, people dying, and other horrifying scenes, Zehairi was forced to take all his clothes off. He was handcuffed to the back and hanged to a ceiling fan. Cables drummed on every inch of his body. The fan then started to circle with Zehairi lost in between death and the earth. Lost without a solid base to stay on and with no seen hole in ceiling for his soul to escape and rest.

A few minutes later, he lost conscious, taken down and woke up by a jug of chilling water then boiling water. He woke up to face another fashion of torture; electric shock. A tool, Zehairi bitterly described, they put on the back and push electricity into it. “I didn’t feel but jumping up and down hard like a terrified cat,” he said. Then they tight his legs and dragged him around the room.

After this dose of torture, Zehairi was exhausted. Feeling nothing around but the sound of whining bodies around him.

“Life for me became a myth,” he said “I didn’t know how I was alive.”

In that Place of the End, Zehairi tells us the circumstances he and other detainees endured. No bathrooms to shower, no light, no clean settings, and lice lived with them feeding on what was left of their blood after the torture. He remembers one time he begged his captor to use the restroom just to quickly pour the chilling water on his body to help kill the lice. But the captor saw him doing so and forced him to shower in the dirty water of the toilet. “You want to be clean?” the captor objected.

When later Zehairi was released [he doesn’t tell how long he stayed in detention] he found that his brother was executed. He fled Iraq to Hungary, where he got 200 injections in a course of therapeutic treatment. He suffered years of relentless night. He always dreamed of security men braking into his house, dragging him on the floor and trying to arrest him.

“I fear the unknown,” he said with widely opened eyes. “I fear that evil would come to me for no reason.”

The Iraq memory Foundation is a non-governmental group that was established by a number of Iraqi former exiles to document the 25 years of miseries Iraq and the Iraqis had lived under the rule of the Baath party and Saddam Hussein. One of the projects this foundation is working on is to document testimonies of Iraqis who have suffered torture or lost relatives to the brutal regime of Hussein. I have got a pack of five DVDs telling stories of about 40 Iraqis. Here, I will tell some of these stories to participate in telling the world our dark history of more than three decades.

He Knows His Father Only By Pictures!


Khalida Mutafa and her husband, Yousif al-Khateeb, have lived happily outside Iraq. There only, the story tells us, is that Khateeb was a member of the communist party, which was banned in Iraq since the bath party got into power in the late 1960s.

The couple have left Iraq to Hungary when Yousif decided to study abroad. He escaped an assassination attempt there. A car drove by Khateeb and shot at him, Mustafa said. Later on they discovered that the car belonged to the Iraqi embassy in Hungary.

“They wanted to kill every honest Iraqi who opposed them,” Mustafa said while fighting her tears back. Her eyes sparkled with tears whenever she mentioned her husband.

In 1979, Khateeb talked to his wife about Iraq. He didn’t tell her what he was planning, going back to Iraq in disguise. He told her that they should continue “serving the party and Iraq,” she said in her Mosul dialect. She stammered, sighed, and wiped away the tears. She was devastated when she was telling the story, but bravely continued. They kept talking about serving Iraq for a week, but Mustafa didn’t know what for.

“I didn’t even farewell him,” Mustafa recalled. “He left, but I don’t know where to,” she said and broke into tears again.

Twenty seven years have passed, but the wife and the son are still in shock. Baseem, the son, was only nine months when his father left to the unknown. Baseem doesn’t have a visual memory of his father. He only knows that a man called Yousif al-Khateeb once lived and he is his biological father. Pictures are the only evidence for the son that this man existed.

Six months after Khateeb secretly flew into Iraq, he was arrested with 57 other communist party members. Members of the party in Hungary contacted Mustafa to tell her that her husband was arrested in Iraq. He was arrested in 1979 and she never heard from him or about him ever since.

“I don’t know if he was melted in acid or killed or if his body is in a mass grave.”

Baseem, the son, grew in an environment where all the people around him talked about a missing father who might have been killed or talked about arrested people. The impact of this environment was obvious on the child. When he was asked to draw something in the elementary school, Mustafa said, he always drew bars and a man behind them. “He always claimed ‘this is my father,’ she said.

When one of his birthdays approached, he said, his mother asked him what he wanted as a gift.

“Give me money only,” he replied to his mother. “I wanted to get something to remind me of him,” Baseem said of his father. “I wanted it to be with me all my life and show people that I love my father even though I didn’t see him.”

Baseem tattooed his father’s picture on his right hand. A gift he gave to himself in his birthday. He lost his father once but will never lose his face from now on.

“I missed him so much,” Mustafa said “when I sleep, I look at his side of the bed and see it empty. It is not easy for a woman to lose a husband.”

When Saddam Hussein was toppled, Mustafa was nailed before the TV to watch the moment when Hussein’s statue was downed.

“It was a delight when the statue, which stayed for 35 years, was downed,” she recalled in joyful tone, “but I still don’t know anything about my husband.”