Human Rights: A terrible story of mistreatment in Iraq's Abu Ghraib Prison
Abdallah, a member of the Ba'ath Party whose loyalty became suspect was imprisoned for four years at Abu Ghraib in the 1980s. On the second day of his imprisonment, the men were forced to walk between two rows of five guards each to receive their containers of food. While walking to get the food, they were beaten by the guards with plastic telephone cables. They had to return to their cells the same way, so that a walk to get breakfast resulted in twenty lashes. According to Abdallah, It wasn t that bad going to get the food, but coming back the food was spilled when we were beaten. The same procedure was used when the men went to the bathroom. On the third day, the torture continued. We were removed from our cells and beaten with plastic pipes. This surprised us, because we were asked no question. Possibly it was being done to break our morale , Abdallah speculated. The torture escalated to sixteen sessions daily. The treatment was organised and systematic. Abdallah was held alone in a 3x2-meter room that opened onto a corridor. We were allowed to go to the toilet three times a day, then they reduced the toilet to once a day for only one minute. I went for four years without a shower or a wash , Abdallah said. He also learned to cope with the deprivation and the hunger that accompanied his detention: I taught myself to drink a minimum amount of water because there was no placed to urinate. They used wooden sticks to beat us and sometimes the sticks would break. I found a piece of a stick, covered with blood, and managed to bring it back to my room. I ate it for three days. A person who is hungry can eat anything. Pieces of our bodies started falling off from the beatings and our skin was so dry that it began to fall off. I ate pieces of my own body. No one, not Pushkin, not Mahfouz, can describe what happened to us. It is impossible to describe what living this day to day was like. I was totally naked the entire time. Half of the original groups [ of about thirty men ] died. . It was a slow type of continuous physical and psychological torture. Sometimes, it seemed that orders came to kill one of us, and he would be beaten to death. (Source: Human Rights Watch)