Global Policy Forum

By Luke Harding

For the families standing in the dusty car park of Abu Ghraib prison yesterday, the revelations of torture and abuse came as no surprise. Every morning, relatives of Iraqi detainees inside the US prison, just west of Baghdad, gather in the hope that their loved ones might be released. They rarely are.

The photos of US soldiers abusing and humiliating Iraqi detainees may have provoked outrage across the world. But for Hiyam Abbas they merely confirmed what she already knew - that US guards had tortured her 22-year-old son Hassan. Breaking down in tears, Mrs Abbas said US guards had refused to let her in. She had so far only managed to see Hassan once - two months ago - following his arrest last November. "He told me: 'Mum, they are taking our clothes off. We are nude all the time. They are getting dogs to smell our arses. They are also beating us with cables.'

"It's completely humiliating," Mrs Abbas said. "My son is sick and suffering from hypertension. During the interview the American soldiers were standing so close to us. My son was crying."

Her son had been detained in the Baghdad suburb of Al-Dora, after a gang broke into their house. What did she think of the Americans now? "They are rubbish," she said. "Saddam Hussein may have oppressed us but he was better than the Americans. They are garbage."

Yesterday other Iraqis gave similar accounts of what goes on inside Abu Ghraib, once a centre of torture and execution under Saddam. The US military last week claimed that "no more than 20" US soldiers had been involved in abusing and humiliating inmates. The vast majority of US guards were not involved, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt suggested.

Yesterday, however, Abu Salem, who spent six months inside Abu Ghraib between August and February, said abuse by US guards went on all the time. Mr Salem, 41, said he had also known about the practice of US soldiers posing for pictures with Iraqi prisoners for five months. "This didn't take place in the general camp but in individual cells," he said.

Naked

Mr Salem said he had been in the jail shortly before a visit from the International Red Cross in January. Until then, detainees in the prison wing had been kept naked. "The night before the Red Cross arrived, the American soldiers gave them some new clothes. They told us that if we complained to the Red Cross about our treatment we would be kept in prison forever. They said they would never let us out."

Mr Salem said he had come to the jail, a short drive from the town's chaotic vegetable market, to try to find out what had happened to his three brothers. They were still inside the prison, he said, behind its outer fence and a vast razor wire- topped inner wall. Generally, detainees were only tortured in the days immediately after their arrest, during interrogation, he added. Many of the allegations made by Mr Salem and other former detainees yesterday correspond with the damning internal US army report into Abu Ghraib obtained by the Guardian and the New Yorker magazine.

Advertiser links Yesterday the mother of one detainee, Samira Hassan, said the latest allegations were horribly familiar. Her 22-year-old son Abbas had been arrested three months ago while walking past a US military base in the Baghdad suburb of Amariya. She finally managed to see him in prison two weeks ago. "He told me they are using electric shocks against the prisoners and taking off their clothes. He also told me something I can hardly talk about - that the Americans are raping the Iraqi men. "This is terrible," Mrs Hassan said. "This is shame for us. We have a different culture and different religion. They should not do that.

"We are not talking about one case but of thousands of cases," she said. "The Americans said they would bring us freedom. Is this what they mean?"

Not all the detainees inside Abu Ghraib were young men, it emerged yesterday, or even very plausible resistance fighters. Several relatives wearing flowing white dish-dashes had turned up to try to visit Qahta al-Salim, a prominent 70-year-old sheikh from the Sunni town of Samarra. Mr al-Salim had been in American custody for four months, his son, Mutashar Qahtan, said. US soldiers arrested him at his home after a neighbour claimed he supported the resistance. "My father is an old man. He has a heart complaint. The first thing they did was to make him stand up for 12 hours," he complained. "They then took him to Tikrit and finally to here."

Mr Qahtan said the allegations of abuse by US soldiers were "nothing new". He said he spent 47 days last year in US custody in Tikrit. "Personally they didn't do anything wrong to me," he said. "But I saw for myself what they did to others. They forced a group of prisoners to stand naked on the roof for seven days. They also told us that all Iraqis were shit."

There are around 8,000 Iraqi prisoners in US custody, held in camps across Iraq without trial or access to a lawyer. A tiny minority of those detained are high-ranking members of the former regime.

Victims

Relatives, however, insist that the majority of "security detainees" are innocent, and claim they are often victims of random arrest following attacks on coalition forces. Either way, the images of torture and humiliation would merely serve to fuel the armed struggle against US occupation, Majid al-Salim, the brother of the imprisoned sheikh, said.

"The Americans are driving people into the arms of the Maqawama [resistance]," he said.

"We now look back at Saddam's era with nostalgia," he added. "He was a good leader.

There was security. We hope he comes back."