As we commemorate the tenth anniversary of America’s invasion of Iraq, I find myself turning away from the usual signposts—the dead, the money, the ruins—and calling up instead a memory from the afternoon I spent in a place called Al Hakemiya.
It was April 20, 2003, eleven days after Saddam Hussein and his confederates had scurried from Baghdad. Anarchy was in full gallop—thievery and depravity were unfolding across the capital. The new paradigm, the liberation-as-catastrophe, had already started its nine-year run.
Surveying the chaos from an Iraqi car, I wondered whether evidence of the old regime’s misdeeds would be gobbled up by the fire. I turned to my driver, an Iraqi I’d met only a couple of days before. “Do you know a place where people were tortured?” He shrugged and turned the wheel of his battered car.
We drove to a neighborhood called Karrada, one of the loveliest in the city. At the end of a leafy street sat a squat three-story building, bigger than the surrounding houses but otherwise nondescript. This is it, my driver said—Al Hakemiya, a place run by the Mukhabarat, which in Arabic means “secret police.”
Inside, Al Hakemiya was filled with visitors. Wandering around this fresh relic of Saddam’s terror, the Iraqis seemed stunned and blinkered; they ran their hands along the walls and peered into the tiny cells, which only two weeks before had contained their fellow citizens.
I spotted a man whose face wore a look of deep worry. His name was Al-Musawi—he wouldn’t give his first name. Six years before, Musawi told me, he’d come to know intimately the workings of Al Hakemiya. One day, in 1997, a pair of agents from the Mukhabarat had come for him, coaxing him into their car with smiles and shrugs. “We just want to ask you a few questions,’’ they said. The agents brought him here, where they accused him of illegally shipping gold out of the country. It was baseless charge, Al-Musawi told me, made by an old business rival.
Al-Musawi and I walked together through Al Hakemiya’s long hallways. He took me to the room where his arms had been nearly torn from their sockets. He pointed to the place where he’d been hung from the ceiling. He walked me to the room in the basement where his body had leaped and twisted to currents of electricity. Finally, Al-Musawi located his own cell, a small dark room with a heavy metal door.
“Here it is,’’ he said. “My cell. Number thirty-six.”
He looked for a time but didn’t go in. He lit a cigarette.
“Being here gives me a doomed feeling,’’ he said.
I asked Al-Musawi why he’d returned, and he pointed back to himself, suggesting a need to quiet storms inside. “They did humiliating things to me,’’ he said. “I needed to come and see the place.”
Al Hakemiya’s most ghoulish aspects were located downstairs. In the basement, on my own, I found an operating table, with a small tray of cutting instruments. Outside, in the backyard, stood a small, refrigerated building, with six trays, each about six feet long—a morgue.
Back upstairs, there was a kind of front office. I found photographs of unhappy men, stapled to pages and pages of forms. I found stacks of legal documents, including property titles, stock certificates, and receipts. Al Hakemiya was a shakedown operation, for the benefit of Saddam’s men. Al-Musawi’s relatives paid twenty-five thousand dollars to his jailers—everything the family had, he said—and still they did not release him. Al-Musawi got out only after Saddam, in a large-scale amnesty, threw open the doors of the prison a few months before the Americans arrived.
Today, in 2013—a decade later—it’s not fashionable to suggest that the American invasion of Iraq served any useful purpose. It was a catastrophe, born of original sin—of lies and exaggeration and trumped-up intelligence. How many times have you heard that this week? There are a hundred thousand dead Iraqis, more than four thousand Americans killed, and a bill for a trillion dollars. Indeed, the near-universal certainty that America’s war in Iraq was nothing but bad is as widespread and unbreachable as the notion, in 2003, that Saddam had to go.
But what are we to make of Iraqis like Al-Musawi? Or of torture chambers like Al Hakemiya? Where do we place them in our memories? And, more important, how should they shape our judgment of the war we waged?
I’d say: Ask the Iraqis—that is, if anyone, in this moment of American navel-gazing, can be bothered to do so. My guess is that the answers would be richer and more surprising than the one-dimensional debate we are engaging in at home.
By the end of my visit to Al Hakemiya, I’d talked to at least a dozen Iraqis who’d been tortured there. And then, as I made my way back to the car, I found an Iraqi of another sort: a man who had worked there, a jailer. His name was Imad Muhammed. There was something that he wanted to ask me.
“Would you like to see where the prisoners were tortured?”
Photograph by Paolo Pellegrin/Magnum.
