- There is one question that Iraqi intelligence agents
are not supposed to put to the people they interrogate under torture. They
never ask why their prisoners oppose Saddam Hussein.
-
- Brutality has become such a commonplace in the culture
that keeps Saddam in power that his minions cannot be allowed to doubt
whether the evil they commit is normal.
-
- Interviewing defectors from the Iraqi power structure
entails hearing about so many inhuman acts that when one agent of the
mukhabarat
(security service) said he had worked in the Bureau of Murders, I thought
he meant the office that committed them. In fact, it was the office that
investigated murders.
-
- There are many startling stories about Iraq. Saddam
gunned
down half his cabinet after he took power in 1979; Uday, his eldest son,
raped and killed a woman, then gave her family a car in compensation;
Qusay,
his second son, ordered Abu Ghreib prison to be "cleaned out"
and had 2,000 prisoners executed in 24 hours.
-
- What these stories obscure is the day-to-day oppression
that 16m Iraqis endure. The people who commit brutal acts say: "It
was normal to us."
-
- Omar Ismael, now a refugee in western Europe, worked
for 14 years in the mukhabarat and rose to the rank of captain before
fleeing
six months ago.
-
- He is not an unfeeling man: he talks movingly about
wanting
his children, Mustapha, 9, and Raima, 6, to escape from Iraq and join him.
But he has no remorse about the job he considered "normal".
Ismael
saw so many people killed in Iraqi prisons that he no longer remembers
their names or the number.
-
- Ismael did not leave Iraq because he opposed Saddam,
but because he thought he would be the next victim. His final mission is
a chilling warning of how far beyond any civilised boundaries the regime
in Iraq has gone.
-
- Ismael's last order - one he did not obey because he
believed he would have been killed - was to travel to London and
assassinate
Iraqi opposition leaders.
-
- He was given weeks of training with 14 other mukhabarat
agents, all being prepared for similar missions. He was to pose as an
asylum
seeker in London and ingratiate himself with opposition figures there.
For weeks his instructors at the Salman Pak bureau of the mukhabarat
schooled
him in what to say to his interviewers to convince them he was a political
refugee. He was given a passport with a new name identifying him as a
Shi'ite,
the branch of Islam that is followed by those in the south of Iraq and
is viewed with suspicion by Saddam's Sunni elite.
-
- He was told to say he had been imprisoned for joining
the Shi'ite rebellion that followed Saddam's defeat in the Gulf war and
was taught the dialect of the south. More sinister was the training he
received to fire a gun with a silencer and to use thallium, a slow-acting
poison that has featured in Iraqi assassinations.
-
- "They told me to go to London, to remain quiet for
two months and get myself established. They said the government of Britain
would pay me some money and I should live only on that. Then I was to get
close to three people. They showed me thick files on the people in
London."
-
- He left through northern Iraq, now in control of the
Kurds, and was given money by an Iraqi agent in Ankara. He was to check
in with Baghdad every week through contacts in Romania and Greece. If he
needed a weapon or thallium compound, he had a number to call in
Cyprus.
-
- "I was told I would be given new orders after two
months," Ismael said. "I knew I was supposed to assassinate these
people for three reasons: one, why else would they teach me to use a
silenced
gun and thallium; two, I was told not to worry about my children - they
would be taken care of; and three, the way the mission was set up in
Baghdad,
they could deny any connection with me if I was caught."
-
- Ismael decided to flee. He knew what could happen to
him because for years he had been a "technician" - recording
torture sessions or helping with electrical equipment during the
interrogation
of suspects.
-
- The equipment, imported from Germany by the health
ministry,
was a machine manufactured to restart patients' hearts with a jolt of
electricity.
The mukhabarat modified it to deliver stronger jolts.
-
- Every torture session had to be recorded and a tape sent
to the office of Qusay, who runs Iraq's Special Security Organisation.
Like the Nazis, the Iraqi regime is keeping details of the crimes it
commits
in its own archives. The record could be invaluable to any tribunal
convened
to consider the regime's crimes against humanity.
-
- "Sometimes we had so much work that we could not
record everything, but we sent many tapes," Ismael said. "Always
one question was asked: who are you working with?"
-
- Electrodes were placed on suspects' heads or genitals.
Whenever a question went unanswered, said Ismael, the voltage was
increased.
-
- Torture trio: Iraqis live in terror of Saddam, with Uday,
left, and Qusay His career reveals the depth of the regime's paranoia.
In April 1998 Ismael and four other agents followed Taha Abbas Hababi,
the director of the Al Eimn al-Amn, Iraq's equivalent of MI5. Hababi was
considered to have gone "soft".
-
- "We found nothing against him after two months,
so we made a tape of his daughter having sex with a man," Ismael said.
"We had to drug her first."
-
- When Hababi was sent the tape he went directly to a
meeting
with Saddam and Qusay. He was not seen again until his body was delivered
to his family two months later.
-
- Executions were routine. "Prisoners would be put
in a room and killed by a man who just opened fire, spraying them with
bullets," Ismael said. "Then another man would come and put a
bullet in each one's head, to be sure. Once we found a man who had died
without any bullet holes in him - from fear, I think."
-
- On one occasion Ismael and fellow mukhabarat agents were
called to witness the execution of two colleagues. "I think it was
to make an example of them," he said.
-
- In Ismael's last year one name kept emerging in torture
sessions: Amar Turki, said to be an opposition leader based in London.
Iraq had no file on him. Part of Ismael's mission was to find Turki. He
was also ordered to get close to Arras Habib, of the Iraqi National
Congress,
and Mohammed Safie, another opposition leader. Habib is not surprised.
"I was told Saddam offered 40m dinars [£17,000] for my
death,"
he said yesterday.
-
- Ismael was sent on his mission last August and, having
sought sanctuary, says he can never return to Iraq. His story would be
amazing had other former mukhabarat agents not provided similar
accounts.
-
- Khaled Jenabi, now a refugee in Jordan, was also a
mukhabarat
officer until he left last year. His brother, Kamel, a field marshal,
was shot dead by Qusay after an argument. Jenabi believes that Saddam
felt he had become too popular.
-
- Both Khaled Jenabi and Ismael were sons of the regime.
Ismael was recruited from university; Jenabi at 16. "I was told by
my tribe that I had been chosen by Saddam. I was very proud," Jenabi
recalled. He started as a bodyguard to Barzan Tikriti, Saddam's brother
and a former head of the mukhabarat, then graduated to spying on fellow
Iraqis.
-
- He drugged female relatives of government or army
officials
and filmed them having sex. Some tapes were used for blackmail, others
to keep officials in line. The tortures Jenabi saw in prisons ranged from
pulling nails to burning skin with a blowtorch. "Iraqi prisons are
like burial places - once you enter, you never leave," he said.
-
-
-
- MainPage
http://www.rense.com
-
-
-
- This
Site Served by TheHostPros
|