CHAPTER 1
Baghdad. Nine months earlier
Baghdad military training center lay by a main road on the outskirts of the city. It was large and utilitarian, and I felt dwarfed by it as I approached the main entrance. The sun was burning, and the cars in the busy street had all their windows wound down, their drivers crumpled and oppressed by the midday heat. I wiped a trickle of sweat from my own forehead and looked around up at the high walls of the building: a huge picture of Saddam Hussein returned my gaze. It was a familiar sight, one that had been commonplace in my life for as long as I could remember. The gates of Al-Zahawi primary school, which I had attended as a child, were colorful, painted with a huge yellow bumble bee to welcome the children; but on the walls on either side of the bumble bee were paintings of Saddam. His Excellency smiled down benevolently upon us, and around his head flew birds painted in the colors of the national flag. Inside the walls, high up, were more pictures of Saddam, and the slogans of the Ba’ath party were written large—“One Arab nation with an everlasting message,” “Unity, Freedom, and Communism”—as well as one of Saddam’s favorite sayings: “Always look your enemy in the eye.”
Today, however, the images seemed more imposing and threatening than ever—the very embodiment of everything from which I had been trying to break free.
“I don’t want to be in the army,” I had told my Uncle Saad petulantly when it had become apparent that there was no other option open to me.
“You haven’t got any choice. You’ve been called up, and if you don’t go they will consider you to be a deserter. When they catch up with you—which they will if you are still in the country…” He made a deft flicking sign by his right ear to indicate its removal—the standard punishment for anyone who went AWOL. “I’ve seen people selling these ears on the black market so that deserters can have them sewn back on. Trust me, they are not a pretty sight.”
For a moment I thought he was joking, but one look at his face told me that he wasn’t. “Will you keep looking for someone to help us?”
Saad looked around nervously, checking that no passersby—no matter how innocent they looked—could overhear our conversation. Idle talk had a tendency to find its way back to military intelligence, and the consequences could be severe. “I don’t know, Sarmed. The stakes are higher now. Not attending university is one thing, but running away from the army is quite another. If any of my colleagues were caught deserting during the Iran-Iraq war, they were shot in front of their relatives and the families had to pay for the ammunition. They were told it was their fault their sons were being executed, because they had allowed their children to grow up into opponents of the regime.”
“I know,” I insisted quietly. “That’s why I want to leave. I don’t want to be part of it. Please, keep looking for me.”
I handed my call-up papers to the guard at the entrance. He did not speak as he looked through them. “Go to reception,” he said finally and opened the heavy gates.
Inside the center everything was painted an austere military green. Huge metal structures around the edge of the main parade ground housed the various quarters, and nowhere was there any sign of ornament—apart, of course, from the ubiquitous pictures of Saddam in military uniform. In some pictures his military decorations were on display; others showed him firing an RPG-launcher or an AK-47. I was handed my military ID and given my provisions—uniform, boots, beret, and belt—before being shown to my quarters. I was in a huge dormitory with bunk beds neatly arranged along its length. A thin strip of window along the top of the wall let in only a small amount of light. Once I had stowed my few belongings under my bed, I was taken off to have my head shaved. There was no time after that to get settled in: my training began that very day.
The first month at the center was an extension of the national education program I had undergone at school. We were taught all about the army: how it was split into divisions and what the responsibilities of each division were. We were told about the facilities of the compound, and it was explained to us that we would be expected to undergo a very tough regime of physical and military training to ensure that we were fit enough in three months to join our unit—wherever that might be. We were taught how to salute superior officers, how we should store and look after our weapons once they were issued—all the little nuggets of knowledge that would start to make this mismatched bunch of citizens look a bit more like soldiers.
The officers could not have cared less about our mental education; it was our physical education with which they were most concerned. We were rudely woken at first light one morning—about six o’clock—and told to present ourselves immediately in the training area of the parade ground. Five minutes later, a group of sleepy recruits did their best to form an orderly line by a bed of evil-looking barbed wire. Two arifs—not officers, exactly, but the men in charge of our training—stood stony-faced, AK-47s at the ready. We stood silently as they examined each and every one of us, checking our fingernails and our hair and making sure our uniforms were spotless. Then they spoke. “You each have sixty seconds to crawl under the barbed wire and come out unscathed at the other end,” one of them barked. I looked at the barbed wire more carefully. It was spindly and knotted and raised little more than a foot from the ground. To crawl underneath it without getting scratched horribly, you would need to take it slowly. “You,” the arif shouted at the first recruit in line. “Go!”
The recruit crouched down on all fours, then flattened himself on his belly. As he crawled gingerly under the barbed wire, the two arifs started firing their Kalashnikovs into the ground. The guns were clearly shooting blanks, but the poor recruit did not know this. As the first shot was fired, he jumped almost out of his skin. A piece of barbed wire tore into his trousers, and the rough cloth was quickly stained red. He started scurrying more quickly and sustained a few more wounds to his flesh, but he made it out the other side in the allotted time and was packed off to tend to his injuries.
I was next. Reluctantly I crouched down in front of the barbed wire with my gun in my hand. Trying to ignore the explosions of the nearby AK-47s, I gently wove my way to the other side, managing to emerge unscathed. As I stood up, the first arif looked at his watch. “Sixty-eight seconds,” he told me with menace in his voice. “Come with me.”
He grabbed me by the shoulder, pushed me in front of him, and kicked me hard from behind. I fell to my knees. “Over there,” bellowed the second arif.
About twenty meters from the barbed wire was a muddy pit, perhaps four meters in diameter and a couple of meters deep. The two arifs pushed me toward it while my comrades looked on. Once we were by its side, one of them struck a blow to the pit of my stomach with the butt of his Kalashnikov. Winded, I collapsed to the ground once more. Gasping to catch my breath, I felt a heavy boot kick into my ribcage as the two proceeded to beat me with their hands and feet until my body was bruised and bloodied. At no point, however, did they touch my face. I later found out why: I was expected to look presentable when I was on display, and bruises or cuts to the face were not acceptable. But any parts of my body that could be covered by a uniform were fair game.
The beating felt as though it lasted an hour—it probably lasted only a minute—and when the arifs finished making an example of me, I was pushed roughly over the side of the pit. I fell heavily into a pool of cool mud at the bottom and felt it seeping through the coarse material of my uniform.
“Stand up!” one of the arifs shouted at me. Painfully I pushed myself up off the ground. “Now,” he shouted. “Climb out of there, and next time I tell you to do something in sixty seconds, do it in sixty seconds. Understood?”
That was my first encounter with the pit, but it was not to be my last. Whenever one of us failed to achieve a task that had been set—maybe we had not climbed over a wall as quickly as we had been instructed to, or not let ourselves remain suspended at the top of an obstacle course for long enough—we were beaten and thrown over its sides. The beatings varied in their intensity, according either to the gravity of our misdemeanor or to the whim of the arif in charge, but they were always brutal enough to persuade us to pay very close attention to what we were told to do, and to carry it out to the letter. We soon learned to make every attempt to land on our feet when we were thrown over the side of the pit: if our uniforms became too muddy, we were likely to be forcefully hosed down and left to complete our exercises in sopping wet clothes. The soaked material chaffed unpleasantly against our torn skin, and if the hosing-down happened to take place in the heat of the day, the wet uniform turned boiling hot and scorched our skin before the water evaporated and the cloth dried.
Nobody was spared these beatings, even those who performed well. The arif wanted all of us to know exactly what sort of brutality we could expect if we stepped out of line. Gradually as our skill at the various tasks increased, the beatings became less frequent. But when they did occur, they were inflicted with even greater vigor and with a larger dose of humiliation, for the arifs knew it would reflect poorly on them if they delivered substandard recruits to the unit bases at the end of the three-month training period.
At the other end of the parade ground we could see the more recent recruits receiving the same treatment that had been meted out to us only weeks earlier. Some members of our group laughed when they saw this. It was only natural, I suppose, that having been treated like animals, some of them would turn into animals themselves. The rest of us just looked on grimly as we did our best to get on with the job at hand.
Once a week, a graduation ceremony was held at the training compound, and those recruits who had completed their training were assigned to the unit that would be their home for the next three years. The ceremony was held on the parade ground: we saluted the flag, and then the names of all departing soldiers were read out, along with their destinations. On the morning of my ceremony, I awoke with a dreadful feeling of foreboding. I had endured the hardships of the training compound with the vague hope in the back of my mind that I would be able to get out of Iraq, away from the brutality and the torment, before being assigned to my unit, and was comforted by the knowledge that my family was only a few miles away. How would I cope if I were sent to one of the distant reaches of the country, where my family and my hopes of freedom would seem even more remote?
We lined up in front of the whole population of recruits and saluted the flag. Then, one by one, our names were called out. When I heard mine, I stepped forward to be told my fate. “The brave and courageous soldier Sarmed Alsamari will be leaving to join our glorious regiment in Al-Amarah!”
My heart sank. Al-Amarah was a good four hundred kilometers from Baghdad, more than halfway to the southern city of Basra and close to the Iranian border. The road there was slow, and getting back to see my family on leave would be difficult. But I did not let these thoughts appear on my face as I received my honor. The camp officers were eyeing us all carefully, and a look of disappointment would have been insubordination if they were of a mind to make it so. The news had bruised me enough as it was; I felt no desire to add physical pain to my mental turmoil.
I couldn’t believe it. I had never been to the south before, and now I was being packed off to a military unit miles from anywhere for three years. I called Uncle Saad to see if there was anything he could do, any favors he could call in or bribes he could pay to keep me at least in Baghdad. But there was nothing he could do, and when the day came, I prepared to be transported to my unit.
We piled into the green-painted Russian-built trucks covered with thick green canvas that were waiting outside the compound. There were perhaps twenty other recruits who were going to Al-Amarah with me, but we would be dropping other soldiers off at various units along the way. The front seats were already taken up by the arif and some of the more thuggish recruits. As the rest of us walked on, they eyed us threateningly as if daring us to complain about the seating arrangements.
As we left Baghdad, I felt as though I was leaving civilization behind. The roads became less well cared for, and the villages we passed seemed to become more ragged the farther south we went. Villagers stopped and stared at the convoy of Mercedes vans as they passed through, making me feel like a curiosity. I had become used to acting around soldiers with a care born of suspicion; now, I suddenly realized, I would be treated with suspicion by others. At each checkpoint we were stopped and thoroughly searched by the Red Berets, but as we headed farther south, our number dwindled as the soldiers were dropped off at their respective units. By the time I alighted at Al-Amarah, only the few poor souls who had been stationed at Basra remained.
The unit building was practically identical to the military training compound, both inside and out. Observation posts covered with scrambled barbed wire stood at each corner, and a heavy military presence was on display guarding the entrance. On the front wall was yet another massive picture of Saddam in military uniform. One of the arifs from the training camp lined us up inside the barracks and barked at us to stand quietly; we stood there waiting for the head of the unit to come and take charge of us. After perhaps half an hour he came out of his office and looked us up and down disdainfully. “I hope you have all come prepared,” he called out in a teacherly tone of voice. “If any of you feel you have not come prepared, tell me now and I will arrange for you to be sent back to the training camp.”
Not one of us moved a muscle. We didn’t want to make any gesture that could be interpreted as a desire to go back to that godforsaken place.
“Good,” continued the officer. “You are now under my command. Any action that brings shame upon this regiment or upon our beloved leader, may God protect him and bless him, will be dealt with swiftly and severely. If you are called upon to fight for the great and glorious Iraqi army, it will be an honor. You will therefore keep yourselves in a state of utmost readiness. You will continue to train in the art and techniques of warfare, and I advise you to pay close attention at all times. You never know when our leader, may God protect him and bless him, will call upon you to make use of them to serve and protect our glorious country from our cowardly enemies.”
He gave us a look of barely concealed contempt as the arif shouted, “Attention!” We saluted; the officer saluted back before turning on his heel and returning to the comforts of his office.
We were taken to our quarters. Again I had been allocated a bunk bed in a large dormitory that housed about sixty people; one white sheet had been supplied, and the rest of the bedding was a dirty army green. I stowed away my few personal belongings—a pen and some paper for writing home and a small portable cassette player with a few Western tapes. Western music, unlike the music of Israel or Iran, was allowed in Iraq, with a few exceptions. “By the Rivers of Babylon” by Boney M was one of those exceptions, though I remember that Saad and I had blasted it in his car when I was young—a small gesture of defiance. But in the army, Western music was banned, so those of us who wanted to bring it in were forced to use subterfuge. On one of my short periods of leave from the training camp, I had taken some tapes of the music I liked to listen to—Michael Jackson, Bon Jovi, Wet Wet Wet, A-Ha—and placed them in cassette boxes on which I had written the names of Middle Eastern singers so that they would not be confiscated.
I took a shower before changing into more-comfortable clothes. A number of people tried to phone home from one of the communal telephones. A stern-faced arif sat next to the telephone, listening intently to everyone’s conversations and making a note of how long each person spent on the phone so that everyone could be charged appropriately. The waiting lines for the telephone were long, however, and I was not in the mood to hear the playful laughs of my brother and sister in the background. So I decided to rest before the rigors of the next day.
The following morning we were each assigned a weapon—an Iraqi-made AK-47. Each gun had a piece of what resembled black surgical tape stuck on the side, on which was scrawled a number so that the quartermasters could keep track of who had been issued which weapon. I soon found out that, although our training period was at an end, there was much that we were still expected to learn. At the Baghdad training compound, we had been taught how to handle weapons at the most basic level; now our skills were to be honed and specialized. A special unit came in, for example, to teach us how to plant land mines. We were each given a box containing several heavy, defused land mines. As I slowly took one of the weapons from its packaging, I was very aware that this was the instrument that had almost killed my uncle during the Iran-Iraq war.
While stationed on the front line, on Iranian territory near Basra, Saad had been ordered to lead his men into a minefield. He was one of the lucky few to escape with his life. Debris from a nearby explosion detonated a cluster of mines, and he was knocked unconscious. He awoke to discover that he had been blown one way, his leg the other. His remaining leg had been cut deep enough to expose the bone of his knee, and his whole body was deeply splintered with sharp, angry pieces of hot shrapnel. How he survived is a mystery even to him.
The day I went with my family to visit Saad in the hospital is one of the most vivid memories of my youth. We all packed into his tiny hospital room, and had I not known it was Saad lying in the bed, I wouldn’t have recognized him. His face and body were bandaged up. The outer layer of his skin had been burned and peeled away by the force of the blast; what remained was red and sore. The land mine had severed his leg below the knee, but the remainder of that limb was so riddled with shrapnel that it had been removed several inches above the knee. The other leg was little more than a patchwork of skin grafted from different parts of Saad’s body. You could place a magnet on certain parts of him and it would stick because of all the shrapnel embedded beneath his skin. He was unconscious when we saw him, and my mother and grandmother wailed with tears at the sight of their beloved Saad in such a state. I remember my father standing emotionless in the corner of the room. “I told you this is what would happen if you ran off to war” the look on his face seemed to say. It was a stark introduction for a six-year-old to the realities of battle.
Now I was learning how to plant the same weapon so that it could mutilate some other foreign soldier or maybe an unsuspecting civilian unlucky enough to stumble across it. A thick circle of gray metal, perhaps two inches thick, the mine had a second, smaller circle protruding from the top. The mine was to be placed in the dirt, or underwater in the mud, so that it was not visible, and then a small pin was removed to arm it. The slightest movement above the mine would detonate it, and the results would be devastating. We were not taught how to defuse land mines. For that knowledge, we were told, we had to wait until our second year.
We were taught how to arm and fire heavy BKC machine guns that could hit targets over two kilometers in the distance. Two soldiers were needed to operate them—one to fire the weapon, the other to feed the long chain of ammunition into it. On the grounds of the unit was the shell of a Russian-style tank. We were not taught to drive tanks—that was a specialized job not suited to such low-ranking soldiers as ourselves. Instead we were taught how to fire the machine gun perched at the top. In a battle situation the gunners would be on full display—cannon fodder for enemy troops, who could pick them off with the greatest of ease.
I remembered the maxim I was taught at school, a favorite saying of Saddam’s that we were forced to commit to memory: “He who does not sweat to build his country will not bleed defending it.” We had been trained since childhood to see weaponry as part of everyday life. Guns were commonplace, of course, but even when I was young I had come into contact with weapons of far greater destructive power. As a young boy I spent time living with my father in the northern city of Mosul, in the semirural surroundings of the College of Forestry and Agriculture. One day my friends and I decided to go hunting for the foxes that had been terrorizing my beloved chickens, which I kept in the yard, so we set off along the road that led into the forest.
After walking for an hour or so, we came across an area enclosed by barbed wire. We had all been into the forest before, but none of us had stumbled across this enclosure. Not far inside, we saw a huge mound covered with army camouflage material. Peeping out from under the camouflage were large, metal, pointed tips; they were clearly either Scud missiles or some other form of rocket-propelled weapon. A family of foxes were scurrying over the missiles or nestling peacefully under their tips. We stood in silence for a few moments, staring at our discovery, when suddenly we heard the sound of a car approaching. A red Chevrolet drove up slowly; not wanting to be caught here by a member of the security forces, we ran away as quickly as we could, vowing to return the next day.
Every time we went back to spy on our discovery, the red Chevrolet was always nearby. We never got close enough to find out who was in it, nor did we want to, for fear of being seen. Gradually, though, we began to work out the times that it disappeared—presumably so that the driver could get something to eat or go off duty and swap with somebody else—and we started to formulate a plan. We took an old wheelbarrow to a section of the surrounding wall that either had crumbled naturally or had been destroyed by villagers trying to get in. We filled the wheelbarrow with small pieces of rubble and then took it to the weapons dump, waited for the Chevrolet to disappear, and rolled it close to the barbed wire. If we could throw the rubble at the missiles, we naively thought, and explode one of them, we could launch our first strike in the battle against the foxes. They would be painlessly dispatched, and we would be far enough away to avoid getting hurt.
Of course, the missiles were too deep inside the barbed-wired area for us to score many direct hits, and our aim was not that true in any case. Occasionally a small stone rebounded off the metal with a satisfying clunk, but when we saw the red Chevrolet approaching after about forty-five minutes, we scampered away, and the foxes lived to scavenge for chickens another day.
The next time I spoke to Uncle Saad on the phone, I casually told him about our exploits. He listened attentively before speaking very quietly but with the full weight of his authority: “Listen to me very carefully, Sarmed. You must never do that again. The chances of exploding one of those missiles with a piece of rubble are minuscule, but if you did manage it, you wouldn’t just be wiping out your foxes—you’d be wiping out your home and probably the surrounding villages too.”
I fell silent as the implications of our stupidity were spelled out to me.
“Promise me you’ll never go back there, Sarmed,” Saad continued, “even just to look. It’s not the sort of place you want to be caught snooping around.”
“I promise,” I replied quietly.
Back at my unit, we learned how to use different types of grenades. Special honor was reserved for those soldiers who threw grenades the farthest, and the day after a training session our arms were bruised from the effort of several hours of hurling these heavy weapons into the desert surrounding the camp. We also practiced disassembling and assembling AK-47s. As a child I had practiced using these weapons on the wasteland outskirts of Baghdad with my uncle, so I required no instruction in this part of my training. None of my superiors questioned me about my almost natural ability with the guns, and my sharpshooting skills went from good to excellent.
We were taught basic martial arts movements so that we could become proficient in hand-to-hand combat, and we learned how to fight with the bayonet attached to the end of a Kalashnikov. After only a few weeks of training I learned how to break a man’s kneecap with one solid kick, and I mastered several methods of rendering an opponent helpless so that I could plunge my Kalashnikov bayonet deep into his throat. I learned how to approach a person from behind and kill him in one swift, simple move. Gradually, despite my reluctance, I was being carefully and proficiently instructed in the mechanics of killing. There was an unspoken acknowledgment that, as simple soldiers, we were the pawns in Saddam’s bombastic shows of military bravado. Iraq was never far away from war, and everybody knew somebody who had been killed or horribly injured in one of the leader’s campaigns. Should we find ourselves on the front line, our ability to kill other men would be the only thing with any chance of saving us from a similar fate.
A couple of months into my time at the unit, I looked at the notice board that listed everybody’s duties and training sessions for a particular day. “Al’Tadreeb ala Al-Istijwab” announced one of the sheets, “Interrogation Training.” My name was one of four on the list.
At the appointed time, I made my way to the prison cells. At the training center, misdemeanors had been punished by the pit; here the arifs simply hurled you into prison if you refused to toe the line, or into solitary confinement if you had been particularly wayward. Next to the cells were small, bare interrogation rooms. The room in which my resistance-to-torture training was to take place had nothing but a dull lamp, a metal table, and three metal chairs. Two arifs with clipboards and pencils sat at the table; the third chair had been placed in the middle of the room, directly under a fan that did not so much provide ventilation as simply move the stale air. I stood at attention against one of the walls while I waited for my colleagues to arrive.
Once we were all assembled, one of the arifs addressed us. “You,” the arif pointed at one of our number, “sit down.”
The man singled out was the burliest of the four of us and was from the south. Until now I had avoided him, as did most of the camp. Occasionally in the dining room I had noticed him spitting into the communal food to put people off from eating it. He fraternized only with the members of his own community who also found themselves at this unit—all of them also large and thickset and displaying arrogance bordering on contempt for anybody not in their clique. Despite his overpowering self-confidence, however, he could not hide his nervousness as he took a seat. His hands were bound tightly with rope behind the back of the chair.
“You have been captured,” the arif continued. “Your regiment is moving north, and this is the information that your captors are trying to force you to reveal. They will use any means to get it, but you must reveal nothing.” He turned to the three of us still standing against the wall. “Do what you must to find this information out,” he told us, “with one exception: you are not to cut his face, and you are not to break his bones. He needs to be presentable for lineup. Anything else is acceptable.”
The three of us remained silent; the only noises in the room were the regular whirr of the ceiling fan and the heavy breathing of the soldier tied to the chair. We looked at each other apprehensively, unwilling to attack our colleague but uncertain how to avoid it.
“You!” the arif pointed at me. “You start.”
I stared into the eyes of the prisoner; he looked back defiantly. Slowly I approached him and then, with a brief look at the arif, struck him in the stomach. The blow was as gentle as I dared make it, although it was enough to make the prisoner cough sharply and catch his breath. As he did so, the arif raised his voice. “Harder!” he shouted.
I looked apologetically into the eyes of my victim and punched him more forcefully. His eyes bulged as he struggled to breathe. “Harder!” the arif shouted again. He grabbed a thick cane and hit me hard across the back of my legs.
I found myself shaking as I prepared to deliver another blow; my deep breath trembled in my lungs. Suddenly I heard scuffling behind me. I turned around in time to see one of my colleagues hurl himself at the chair, knocking the victim sideways to the ground. His head cracked as it hit the floor and he cried out; almost simultaneously my associate started to kick him violently in the stomach and the genitals, screaming as though he himself were being attacked. Each time the victim tried to say anything, he received another sharp blow that knocked the power of speech from him. After a minute and a half of severe beatings, the attacker stopped for breath. The victim took advantage of the pause to whimper, “North. My regiment is headed north.”
Suddenly the two arifs were on their feet. Still carrying their clipboards, they placed themselves in front of the chair. “You,” one of them pointed at the attacker who stood shaking with suppressed rage, “good.” He looked down at the victim. He was still lying on his side, his hands were still bound, his tears of pain and humiliation fell directly to the floor, and the chair clattered against the ground as his body occasionally convulsed. “The rest of you niswan [women]—unimpressive. I hope you will act in a manner more befitting your uniform at our next session.” He looked directly at me. “Untie him.”
I bent down and fumbled at the knot, managing finally to loosen it and free the battered body of my fellow soldier. Slowly he stood up. As he did so, he gave me a look of absolute venom, and without waiting to be dismissed by the arif, he stumbled from the room.
I was totally shocked by what had just happened: not so much by the fact that we were expected to do this to our fellow soldiers—when random brutality becomes the norm, you start to accept it almost without thinking—but rather by the effect the situation had had on my colleague who had gone on the attack with fire in his eyes. When I saw him around the base over the next few days, he walked with his head held high, and his arrogant bearing seemed to suggest that his actions had bolstered his own opinion of himself. I saw our victim too, although I tried to avoid him. He refused to speak to me, but every time we met, his eyes seemed to say “Just wait.”
My time was to come quicker than I thought. A couple of weeks later, the four of us were called to the interrogation room once more. On this second occasion, the arif directed me to the chair. The rough rope dug into my skin as he tied my hands tightly; if I tried to move my wrists, they burned even more.
“This prisoner has recently been caught. He was wearing a white T-shirt under his coat with a picture of Saddam Hussein. He claims to be a civilian, but we know that he is a member of military intelligence. You need to make him admit this.”
Sometimes the threat of violence is more terrifying than the violence itself. The air was tense with what was to come; even the arif sensed it. “When you undergo interrogation or torture at the hands of the enemy,” he told me quietly, “you must think of your family and your country. Remember, the pain will be transitory, but Iraq and her glorious armies will live forever. They will soon come and rescue you in repayment for your loyalty and your silence.”
There was eagerness in the eyes of the soldier who had performed the terrible beating during our last session—he had clearly developed a taste for this part of our education—and in the eyes of the victim whose attack I had been forced to precipitate. As the latter man stood before me, waiting for the arif’s permission to start the questioning, he smirked vaguely. My body went weak with dread. Involuntarily I shook my head as I looked up at my two inquisitors, and those few moments seemed to last an age.
There were no shouts this time, neither from me nor from my attackers: they went about their business in ruthless silence. Having already witnessed one of these beatings, I was vaguely prepared for what was in store, so when my chair was pushed over onto its side, I had the foresight to tilt my head so that it did not slap against the ground. Nevertheless, my right arm was crushed between the back of the metal chair and the concrete floor. I tried to shuffle the weight away from my bruised arm, but before I could even move I felt the first kick to my ribs. The force of the strike seemed to thud through my whole body, and I barely had time to let out an involuntary grunt before I felt a blow to my genitals that sent a shriek of pain down my legs. Who did what in the melee that followed, I have no idea. I vaguely remembered trying to shout out the information that they wanted, but the blows were incessant and utterly debilitating. After a while I stopped feeling the pain—my body became numb as the kicks and punches merged into one brutal cocktail.
The last thing I remember seeing was the face of the arif, looking on approvingly. Then I blacked out.