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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
The land around the Abu Ghraib prison, twenty miles west of Baghdad, is barren and dusty. Run-down garages and grubby car-repair shops line the road near the prison's main gate, which is within sight of the grand highway that Saddam Hussein built across Iraq in the early nineteen-eighties. Abu Ghraib is the biggest prison in the country. Until recently, it housed maybe fifty thousand men, although to my knowledge there are no official figures on this. Iraqis told me that it was a "countless" number, or many, many thousands. Quite a few of the prisoners were political detainees, and over the years human-rights organizations have reported that mass executions took place there regularly. I met a man in Jordan, an Iraqi in self-imposed exile, who said that a friend of his had been incarcerated in Abu Ghraib. The friend told him that every Wednesday was execution day at the prison. An old-fashioned Indian hanging machine had been used for a while, but a problem had arisen with noise. There was a terrific banging sound every time the machine dropped a body, and people living near the prison had begun keeping track of the executions by counting the bangs. The old gallows was replaced by a quiet modern device, but the locals still knew when executions were taking place because the condemned men ululated as they went to their deaths. "In our culture, this is something that only women do, when they are happy," the Iraqi exile said. "But the men in Abu Ghraib make the sound because they are so relieved that they are finally going to die."
In mid-October, a few days after Saddam received a hundred per cent of the vote in a referendum on his leadership, all the foreign journalists in Baghdad that the Ministry of Information could round up joined a convoy of vehicles headed for Abu Ghraib. We hadn't been told what was going on, but as we raced out of town the voice of the information minister came on the radio, announcing that Saddam and the Revolutionary Command Council had issued a general amnesty. When we got to the main entrance of the prison, within an hour, relatives and friends of the prisoners were already starting to congregate. They were dancing and waving their arms and chanting hysterically, "Na'am, na'am na'am"--"Yes, yes yes, to our beloved leader Saddam Hussein, We give our lives and blood for you." Some of them shouted "Down Bush!" Men were beating on drums, and one man shot a Kalashnikov into the air. A flatbed truck carrying a green cylindrical tube about the size of a Scud missile moved along the road outside the prison walls, but nobody seemed to notice.
The mob soon overcame the guards who had been trying to keep control of the gates, and I was swept into Abu Ghraib with everyone else. We entered a vast space filled with rubbish and mounds of earth and open holes. The crowd headed toward blocks of cells several hundred yards away, yelling and chanting. Seagulls wheeled above us, and there was a repulsive stench in the air. As we drew near the barracks of the prison, the stench intensified. Gaunt men wearing soiled dish-dashes, the traditional Iraqi men's robe, were coming out of the cellblock area, holding bundles of clothing. Some of them were accompanied by healthy-looking people who wept and kissed and embraced them. A man passed me carrying a younger man who was ashen and apparently so debilitated that he could not walk.
We tumbled through an arched, tunnel-like entrance in a wall at the end of the great plaza of dirt, into another open space, this one a small rectangle of filth surrounded by more walls, with caged entrances that led to the cellblocks. Men and boys ran across the yard and climbed onto roofs and tore aside loops of razor wire to get inside. A few guards waved their arms and screamed things in Arabic that I couldn't understand. I saw the source of the stench: a spectacular mound of garbage that must have been accumulating for years. Human shit clung like caked mud to the razor wire outside the bars of the cells, and more shit lay in piles everywhere. As I stood watching, an Italian reporter for RAI television, a blond woman I had met in Baghdad, came up to me. Her cameraman had been swept away by the mob, and she was on her own, wearing skintight white Armani jeans and a white polo shirt. She said that she needed my help. An Iraqi official in plainclothes told me to get her out of there. Several excited young men had crowded around us and were laughing and pointing. The woman held on to my belt and I guided her through the crowd, assisted by the official, who tried to clear the way for us. Now and then, some of the men moved closer and I could feel the woman flinch as they grabbed her. "I guess it wasn't a good day to wear Armani," she said.
We got back to the tunnel-like entrance just as the guards had managed to chase most of the men from the roofs and were clearing the area. I didn't want to go into the tunnel, which had become something of a gauntlet, and the guards and I were shoving one another back and forth over this issue when a pickup truck with a couple of soldiers in the back drove up. I forced my way onto it, with the Italian woman still attached to me, and the driver of the pickup accelerated and...
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