We know alot about male prisoners being tortured by US troops at Bagram, Kandahar, Abu Ghraib, Bagdad International Airport, GITMO and elsewhere. However, not alot has been reported about the torturing of women in Afghanistan and Iraq.
According to reports a common practice by US troops has been to take women as hostages in order to bargain for the surrender of their husbands.
This practice is illegal and a “grave” violation under the Geneva Conventions and has led to the rape and torture of women in US custody.
More below the fold:
Attached below is a great article recently written by Iraqi journalist Ghali Hassan.
Several documents released on 07 March 2005 by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) show 13 cases of rape and abuse of female detainees.
The documents revealed that no action was taken against any soldier or civilian official as a result. “We have to start to ask the question of whether there is a whole layer of abuse out there that we are not seeing because the evidence of abuse has been covered up”, said ACLU staff attorney Jameel Jaffer.
The documents also provide further evidence that U.S. troops have destroyed evidence of abuse and torture in order to avoid a repetition of last year’s Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal.
Aidan Delgado, a 23-year-old U.S. Army reservist with the 320th Military Police Company told Bob Herbert of the New York Times recently, that he “had witnessed an Army sergeant lashed a group of children with a steel Humvee antenna, and a Marine corporal planted a vicious kick in the chest of a kid about 6 years old”.
After he was deployed to Abu Ghraib Prison, Mr. Delgado told Herbert: “The violence [in Abu Ghraib] was sickening, some inmates were beaten nearly to death”. In one of the many detainees’ protests at Abu Ghraib, the “Army authorized lethal force. Four [unarmed] detainees were shot to death”, said Delgado.
An eyewitness female detainee at Abu Ghraib, who identified herself as `Noor’, told Al-Jazeera that `U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison raped women and, in many occasions, forced them to strip naked in public’. She admitted seeing `many female detainees got pregnant’. Iraqi lawyer Iman Khamas, of International Occupation Watch Centre, said; “One former detainee had recounted the alleged rape of her cell mate in Abu Ghraib.” “[The detainee] had been raped 17 times in one day”, said Khamas.
Professor Huda Shaker Al-Nuaimi, of Baghdad University Political Science Department, told Luke Harding of the Guardian on 12 May 2004, that; `U.S. soldiers in Iraq have raped, sexually humiliated and abused several Iraqi female detainees in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison’.
Al-Nuaimi told Harding that she knows of `Noor’s’ case and other Iraqi females that were arrested, taken to Abu Ghraib prison and raped by the US Military Police. `Iraqi women here are afraid and shy of talking about such subjects’, she added.
Crimes of rape were very rare before the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Rape is shameful crimes, and was introduced to the Muslim World by Western colonialists as a tool of coercion and intimidation.
Moreover, Iraqi women and their children are being taken hostages by U.S. forces and used as `bargaining chips’.
On 11 April 2005, the Guardian reported, that U.S. forces were accused of violating international law by taking Iraqi women hostages to force their male relatives to surrender.
After taking the women (mother and daughter) from their home in Baghdad, U.S. soldiers left a note on the gate: “Be a man Muhammad Mukhlif and give yourself up and then we will release your sisters. Otherwise they will spend a long time in detention”.
One wonders who is the one to “be a man”, U.S. soldiers who are abusing defenceless women or Mr. Muhammad, who is only defending his country against foreign invaders?
Iraqi women are arrested, detained, abused and tortured not because of anything they have done, but to force their close relatives (spouses, sons and brothers) to collaborate with the Occupation and to inform against the Resistance. Contrary to the Geneva Conventions, which stipulate that no one can “be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed”.
The practices, which have been condemned by the UN and human rights organisations, are widely used by the Israeli Army against Palestinian men, women and children in occupied Palestine.
In another interview, Mithal added; “After that, they took me to a detention centre [near Baghdad International Airport]. There, I heard a young woman crying out from her cell, telling an American soldier to leave her alone. She said, “I am a Muslim woman”. Her voice was high-pitched and shaky. Her husband, who was in a cell down the hall, called out, “She is my wife. She has nothing to do with this”. He hit the bars of his cell with his fists until he fainted. The Americans poured water over his face and made him wake up. When her screams became louder, the soldiers played music over the speakers. Finally, they took her to another room. “I couldn’t hear anything more”, Ms. Mithal told Tara McKelvey of American Prospect.
The courage and clarity of Mithal substantiate the ongoing U.S. brutality against the Iraqi women.
Nicole Choueiry, of Amnesty International, said: “I do not think it is the first time. It is against international law to take civilians and use them as bargaining chips”.
U.S. officials do not admit to any female inmates, but evidence shows that women imprisoned in U.S-run prisons including Abu Ghraib and were subjected to abuses including evidence of sexual misconduct, rape and psychological torture against women.
“Overall, 90 women have been held in various detention facilities in Iraq since August 2003”, Barry Johnson, a public-affairs officer for detainee operations with the U.S. told McKelvey. “More women may be in captivity”, he added, “[U.S. Army] units can capture and keep them up to 14 days”. In addition, “approximately 60 children, or `juveniles’, are being held”, noted Tara McKelvey.
There were nearly 625 women prisoners in Al-Rusafah and 750 women prisoners in Al-Kazimiyah alone, including girls of twelve and women in their sixties. Besides, Iman Kamas head of the Occupation Watch Centre affirms that there are five unknown U.S-run prisons in Iraq apart from the well known ten, which include Abu-Ghraib, Al-Kazimiyah, and Al-Rusafah prisons in Baghdad and Um-Qasir and Al-Nasiriyah prisons.
The number of innocent Iraqi prisoners and detainees are increasing every day, together with dramatic increase in the abuse, torture and rape of Iraqi men, women and children.
The number of prisoners in Iraq today is far greater that that under the former regime of Saddam. The level of sexual abuse and torture of Iraqi prisoners and detainees by the former regime was just a fraction in today’s Iraq. Prior to 2003, Western human rights organisations were very vocal and continued to monitor and report the situation in Iraq under the former regime. Iraq was portrayed as a pariah state. But since the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, they follow the U.S. orders and stop their human rights work.
The miseries of the Iraqi people have more than doubled in the last two years, and Iraqis viewed the Occupation as the cause of their miseries. In addition to the crimes of sexual abuse, torture and rape committed by U.S. soldiers against Iraqi women, all other aspects of Iraqi women’s rights have also deteriorated. Women health and women education have fallen significantly. Unemployment, prostitution and malnutrition, have increased dramatically, and are now widespread among Iraqi women today.
To increase the atrocity, the U.S. provides its soldiers with “self-immunity” from prosecution making it very easy for them to kill Iraqis with institutionalised impunity, as if Iraqis were not human beings.
In addition, evidence shows that the U.S-British forces use banned weapons such as napalm and weapons of mass destruction (WMD), which contaminated and polluted Iraq’s environment, and caused health hazards.
My words:
The horrible practice of taking women as hostages apparently continues although the practice appears to be limited to 14 days at this point. However, taking a hostage for as much as one day is illegal under international law. Where is the LA Times, the Washington Post, New York Times when it comes to the torture, rape and hostage taking of women in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Below is another report citing the taking of women as hostages.
A group calling itself the Saladin Al-Ayyubi Brigades, the military wing of the Sunni Islamic Front for the Iraqi Resistance, said the occupation troops kidnapped a mother and three girls on August 26 in Al-Latifia district, 70 kilometers south of Baghdad.
“The coward Americans demanded Iraqi resistance fighters in the area to lay down their arms and hand themselves in to release the four female hostages.
“We vow to teach the US troops a lesson for such a cowardly act unless they set the four free and unharmed,” read the statement, a copy of which was obtained by IslamOnline.net.
“Only men with brave hearts could stand up and fight at battle fields, but cowards resort to such mean ways.
“It is high time that the Iraqis, Sunnis, Shiites, Arabs or Kurds, took an action to defend their honor. We are ready to sacrifice ourselves and offer our lives as a simple token to protect our women,” it added.
Here is the personal story of a women raped while in US custody.
Nadia, the name given by a freed Iraqi female prisoner to Al-Wasat, a weekly supplement of the respectable London-based Al-Hayat newspaper, felt it incumbent upon herself to speak out and expose the less-talked-about abuse of female prisoners in US-run detention camps across Iraq.
With tears rolling down her cheeks, she told the paper how she was stripped by her “liberators” of the most precious thing an Arab and Muslim women can have: Her virginity.
“A thrill of fear ran through me when I saw US soldiers laughing hysterically with a female solider telling me mockingly in an Arabic accent “I never heard about female arms dealer in Iraq”, Nadia said.
“As I tried hard to explain to her that I was wrongly rounded up, the female soldier started accosting and kicking me with my cries and pleas falling on dead ears.”
She went on: “She gave me a cup of water and no sooner had I started sipping it than I went into a deep trance to find myself later naked and raped.”
Five soldiers fondled and raped her one after another in a distasteful sex orgy on the tunes of culturally offensive heavy metal music.
“One month later, a soldier showed up and told me in broken Arabic to take a shower. And before finishing my bath, he kicked the door open. I slapped him but he raped me like animals and called two of his colleagues, who forced me to have sex with them,” added Nadia.
“Four months later, the female soldier came along with four male soldiers with a digital camera. She stripped me naked and started fondling me as if she was a man while her male colleagues broke into laughter and started taking photos.
“Reluctant as I was, she fired four shots close to my head and threatened to kill me if I resist. Then, four soldiers raped me sadistically and I lost conscience. Later, she forced me to watch a clip of my raping, saying bluntly: `Your were born to give us pleasure’.”
Here is another report from the Guardian regarding the abuse of women in Iraq.
For Huda Shaker, the humiliation began at a checkpoint on the outskirts of Baghdad. The American soldiers demanded to search her handbag. When she refused one of the soldiers pointed his gun towards her chest.
“He pointed the laser sight directly in the middle of my chest,” said Professor Shaker, a political scientist at Baghdad University. “Then he pointed to his penis. He told me, ‘Come here, bitch, I’m going to fuck you.'”
“A female colleague of mine was arrested and taken there. When I asked her after she was released what happened at Abu Ghraib she started crying,” Prof Shaker said.
“Ladies here are afraid and shy of talking about such subjects. They say everything is OK. Even in a very advanced society in the west it is very difficult to talk about rape. But I think it happened.”
Human rights campaigners say the US military frequently arrests wives and daughters during raids if the male suspect is not at home.
US officials have acknowledged detaining women in the hope of convincing male relatives to provide information: a strategy that is in violation of international law.
Senior US military officers who escorted journalists around Abu Ghraib on Monday admitted that rape had taken place in the cellblock where 19 “high-value” male detainees are also being held.
Asked how it could have happened, Colonel Dave Quantock, who is now in charge of the prison’s detention facilities, said: “I don’t know. It’s all about leadership. Apparently it wasn’t there.”
Journalists were forbidden from talking to the women, who are kept upstairs in windowless 2.5 metre by 1.5 metre cells. The women wailed and shouted.
They were kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, Col Quantock said, with only a Koran.
Yesterday Prof Shaker said after her ordeal in February her friends dragged her back into the car and drove off. “I vowed never to talk to another American soldier,” she said.
She said the US and Britain should learn from the affair. “You can’t treat human beings in this way. I hope they have learned from this.”
Here is another report summing up the findings of Amnesty International regarding the conditions in Iraq for women.
In a report entitled Iraq – Decades of Suffering, it said that while the systematic repression under Saddam had ended, it had been replaced by
increased murders, and sexual abuse – including by US forces. Washington promised that the overthrow of Saddam would free the Iraqi people from years of oppression and set them on the road to democracy. But Amnesty said post-war insecurity had left women at risk of violence and curtailed their freedoms.
“The lawlessness and increased killings, abductions and rapes that followed the overthrow of the government of Saddam Hussein have restricted women’s freedom of movement and their ability to go to school or to work,” Amnesty said.
“Women have been subjected to sexual threats by members of the US-led forces and some women detained by US forces have been sexually abused, possibly raped.”
Amnesty said several women detained by US troops had spoken in interviews with the group of beatings, threats of rape, humiliating treatment and long periods of solitary confinement.
The Pentagon said it had not seen the report, but took any allegations of detainee abuse seriously.
“We have demonstrated our commitment to ensuring that kind of behaviour is identified and dealt with properly,” spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Joe
Richard said in Washington.
Then there is this article posted on the conservative Lew Rockwell site entitled:
“We Will Rape Your Women, Heck We Will Rape Our Women, But We Would Never Flush the Koran”
This article talks about the great difficulty that the US military is having protecting US female soldiers from being raped by US male soldiers let alone protecting female prisoners from being raped.
Colonel David H. Hackworth wrote, “By April 2004, rapes and assaults of American female soldiers were epidemic in the Middle East. But even after more than 83 incidents were reported during a six-month period in Iraq and Kuwait, the 24-hour rape hotline in Kuwait was still being answered by a machine advising callers to leave a phone number where they could be reached.” This is how we treat American women. This is a reflection on our “culture and values.”
It is widely reported that many American military women serving in Iraq, need guards in order to take a shower because of fear of sexual assaults by their fellow soldiers. Washington wants the world to believe that some of these same troops would never flush a Koran?
American Soldiers have been indicted for raping Iraqi women, but we have no numbers and because we keep no numbers on the number of Iraqi women and children killed in this war, it should be no surprise that we keep no count of Iraqi women reporting that they have been raped by Americans.
In both Iraq and Afghanistan there have been independent and Arab news sources broadcasting the horror of Bush’s Wars. Horrors the American people will never see here at home. The rest of the world sees the carnage taking place every day in Iraq. The bodies of children and their mothers are shown where they died. The horror of an Iraqi hospital can be seen all over the world, except in North America.
In North America, we are not even permitted to see our own Military Hospitals on television, nor the flag draped coffins of our troops who have died in Combat.
My words:
The torture and rape of women in Iraq and particularly Afghanistan have occured with some regularity, but where is the US media; why are they not reporting this. The practice of taking women as hostages and terrorizing women through intrusive house raids continues to occur, but why is no one speaking out?
The horrors that women have felt as a result of this war are tremendous and it needs to stop. The taking of women as hostages needs to stop and the Bush administration needs to allow the Iraqi’s to form the government that they want without forcing upon them “pillars of democracy” and requirements that they set-up a western style democracy.
The safety, health and security of women is largely dependent on the ending of this war and the ending of the practice of taking women as hostages. We all have an obligation to speak out about these atrocities and ask the government to allow the Iraqi people to form an independent government with an Iraqi constitution and work towards removing our troops.
It is now time to talk of an exit strategy and providing compensation to those who have been tortured, abused and seriously hurt as a result of this unnecessary war.
Just yesterday there was a report that the AP received documents relating to the treatment of prisoners at GITMO. Here are a few quotes as reported on Newsmax.
One detainee, whose name and nationality were blacked out like most others in the transcripts, said his medical problems from alleged abuse have not been taken seriously.
“Americans hit me and beat me up so badly I believe I’m sexually dysfunctional. I don’t know if I’ll be able to sleep with my wife or not,” he said. “I can’t control my urination, and sometimes I put toilet paper down there so I won’t wet my pants.”
“I point to where the pain is. … I think they take it as a joke and they laugh.”
One man claimed he was working with the Americans and the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance.
“I was working with you and now I am here, and I see those people here that I helped capture in Afghanistan,” said the purported former commander, adding he fears if he’s ever released to his country he will be killed because of information he has provided to the Americans.
Another Muslim prisoner from Uzbekistan talked of abuse he had suffered and how he was given a Bible – not a Quran.
The testimonies also brought up allegations that interrogators – hastily recruited after the Sept. 11 terror attacks – may have manipulated the confessions.
“When I was in the Kandahar prison, the interrogator hit my arm and told me I received training in mortars,” a man said, referring to the U.S. detention camp in western Afghanistan where the Taliban rose to power.
“As he was hitting me, I kept telling him, no I didn’t receive training. I was crying and finally I told him I did receive the training. My hands were tied behind my back and my knees were on the ground and my head was bleeding. I was in a lot of pain. … At that point, with all my suffering, if he had asked me if I was Osama bin Laden, I would have said yes.
“What is my crime? Because of the United States, my hand is handicapped. I can’t work.”
Another man alleged that U.S. troops stripped the prisoners of their clothes in Afghanistan and bullied them into saying things the Americans wanted to hear.
“Americans were beating us really hard, and they had dogs behind us and they said if we didn’t say this, they would release the dogs,” he said.
The tribunal president made no comment and moved on to the next question: Where were you born?
One prisoner told the tribunal that some of his fellow detainees at Guantanamo are sick and elderly. “I found my brothers being tortured in Kandahar and here,” he said.
He compared his detention at Guantanamo to the 1998 Hollywood movie “The Siege,” in which Arabs are indiscriminately hunted down and detained in New York City after a terrorist attack.
“I was shocked, thinking am I in that movie or on a stage in Hollywood? Is this really happening? Sometimes I laugh at myself and say when does that movie end?” he says.
My words:
This stuff matters, human rights matter, using military force when it is not necessary matters, people dying and being tortured matters; our mission to shine a bright light on these atrocities matters.