BAGHDAD, IRAQ – The American soldiers smashed through 68-year-old Ali Ahmed’s door at 2:30 in the morning. According to Ali, the Americans roughed up one of his four sons, then handcuffed everyone except his wife and 12-year-old boy.
The soldiers ransacked their tiny apartment, took what little money they had, and finally hauled Ali and three of his sons off to what was formerly known as Saddam Hussein’s Presidential Palace.
For the next month, Ali essentially disappeared from the face of the earth. His family received no phone calls, no letters, no hints of whether he was alive or dead or would ever be returning home.
A few weeks after finally being released, Ali, a carpenter, sat in his hot and humid apartment and told his story to two visitors.
He has not been able to work since his ordeal, exhausted by physical and mental stress. He’s distressed that three of his sons are still somewhere in U.S. custody.
Ali said he was handcuffed for four days at the palace while sitting in the blistering sun with his sons. He was never told why he was arrested. Ali and his sons were eventually moved to the Baghdad soccer stadium, where they stayed for more than a week with about 30 other prisoners in an abandoned storeroom.
Later, they were transferred to the Baghdad International Airport, where U.S. forces have constructed a makeshift prison. Ali and two of his sons were put in a tent with about 50 other prisoners. The third son, Omar, was taken away. Ali’s tent shared just two latrines with five other tents. The filth, he said, was overwhelming.
A diabetic, Ali finally collapsed from the stress and lack of medicine. Unable to speak or even stand, he was hospitalized and treated for severe dehydration and given drugs for his illness.
Ali recovered and was moved to the notorious Abu Graeb prison, about 45 minutes from Baghdad. He was once again put into a tent with about 40 others. But this time his sons were not transferred with him.
Eleven days after arriving at Abu Graeb, Ali was told he would leave the following morning. He had, by then, been in custody for almost a month. But he says he was never allowed any contact with the outside world and was never told why he was arrested. His prisoner identification card gives the reason for his arrest as “Baath Party”–in English, not Arabic.
A longtime family friend insisted that Ali has never been even remotely politically involved. The friend also said the family has never been in any sort of trouble with the law.
Ali’s wife, Lemiah Ibrahim, said she was rebuffed by the local police when she inquired about her husband’s whereabouts and ran into a brick wall at the Red Cross. She never approached the American military because, she said, she was too afraid.
“Why would she be afraid of us?” asked one relatively high-level official with the Coalition Provisional Authority’s media office when he was told this story. The official seemed sincere, but the maddening ignorance of his question illustrated a growing worry here in Iraq that the Americans have no idea how they are perceived by ordinary Iraqis.
According to numerous aid workers and local and international activists, Ali’s abduction story is far from rare. The Americans, criticized throughout the world for not providing enough security for the people of Iraq, have detained thousands of people without formally charging them, at least hundreds for undefined political crimes.
“They don’t provide enough security generally, and the few times they do they go all the way overboard,” snapped one experienced security worker.
“They’ve occupied all of Saddam’s palaces, so maybe that has caused them to act like him,” suggested one Iraqi, who pointed out that the ousted dictator regularly arrested people in the middle of the night and whisked them away without informing anyone why they were detained, where they were, or whether they were ever coming home again.
The Americans bristle at the suggestion that they are “disappearing” Iraqi citizens, and claim that one reason prisoners’ families have not been able to find their loved ones is because the American tracking system could not cope with the various English spellings of the detainees’ Arabic names. The system is fixed now, they say, and the families should be able to locate at least some of their relatives. But other detainees–and the Americans won’t say who those are or how many they might be–will remain in an informational black hole.
As for the conditions of Ali’s confinement, an American military spokesman
said prisoners are “treated as human beings and given all comforts.”
This article appears in Sep 11-17, 2003.
