IRAQ: Saddam's police arrested and tortured people on a whim. Now their places of work are open for inspection. Lara Marlowe in Baghdad went to look around
Every neighbourhood in Baghdad had a little walled villa like the secret police headquarters in Kadhimiya. Were it not for the cement flower planters and lamp posts blocking the end of the street, and the now-defaced wall mural of Saddam Hussein, it might have been an ordinary house. But the residents of Kadhimiya knew that merely to walk past the villa was to risk arrest; the mokhabarat didn't like pedestrians hearing their victims' screams.
One of the most poignant things about post-Saddam Iraq is the way people flock around any Westerner, in the mistaken belief that we can help them. Pleas for missing relatives are especially tragic.
Suheila Aziz, a middle-aged Shia woman in a black chador and wire-rimmed glasses, came up to me outside the torture villa.
"We lived in the house next door," she said. "They took my five brothers in 1980: Kassem, Jassem, Hashem, Youssef and Majid. They claimed they were with the Dawa Party, but three of them were illiterate, and Jassem and Youssef were swimming champions."
Over the years, Ms Aziz several times summoned the courage to inquire about her missing brothers. "They said they'd been executed. They wouldn't tell me what happened to the bodies. Then they chased me away."
The Shia Muslim Dawa Party - the word means "the call" - was founded in 1958 and is allied with clergy in Iran. After the Dawa tried to assassinate the former deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz in 1980, Saddam ordered the torture and execution of one of its leaders, Mohamed Bakr al-Sadr, and his sister, Bint Houda.
A government directive ordered that young men suspected of affiliation with the Dawa be arrested and their families expelled. Some 30,000 Shias of Iranian origin were driven out of the country.
Many well-to-do Iranian Shias lived in Kadhimiya and, in this neighbourhood alone, according to residents, 3,000 young men were taken.
Rumour has long had it that arrested Dawa sympathisers served as human guinea pigs for Saddam's chemical and biological weapons programmes.
Yet, despite 23 years of waiting and official claims they were dead, Ms Aziz still hopes to find her brothers.
"There are many underground prisons," she said. "The Fifth Intelligence Station has a tunnel, near the city gate and they found 25 prisoners there, alive, seven floors below ground."
The secret police villa was the confiscated property of an Iranian Shia, and the local mokhabarat chief, Rashid al-Nakib, kept its pretty rose garden. Now, former prisoners and the families of the missing wander round its looted rooms, sifting through the papers that cover the floor. Many visitors are both former prisoners and relatives of the missing.
Hamid Sultan Salman (38), a labourer in a stained green galabiyeh robe, last saw his brother Khadem in 1979. He blames a secret policeman named Hashem al-Tikriti - the clan of Saddam Hussein - for his brother's disappearance.
"I want the Human Rights Commission to find the missing," he declares. "If I asked about my brother, they would have cut my tongue out. I want only one thing; to know if they are dead or alive. Rashid al-Nakib knows where they're buried but he ran away."
Mr Salman was imprisoned at Abu Ghraib, near Baghdad Airport, for five months in 1992. His crime: having said "down with Saddam Hussein".
"They didn't let us see the executions," Mr Salman said. "But we saw them take away the bodies."
Hanging was the usual method, and hanged men defecate as they die. "Afterwards, they took us to clean up the place," Mr Salman recalls, his eyes expressionless.
Falah Hassan Hussein (43), a mechanic from the neighbouring district of Huriya, spent two years and eight months in Saddam's prisons, in two stints. He came to Kadhimiya secret police station yesterday "to search for other people, to help them".
The first time he was jailed, he saw no light for six months. "I was arrested because I was against the regime and the war with Iran and the plight of the people." Mr Hussein spent most of his imprisonment in Abu Ghraib.
"There were two types of executions: political and criminal," he says. "They didn't let the political prisoners see their families before they were executed. The criminals saw their families at 2 p.m., and they were executed after dark. Executions took place on Sunday and Wednesday. They put the noose around their neck and they opened a trap door."
Up to 800 Dawa prisoners died in a prison revolt at Abu Ghraib in February 1987, Mr Hussein said. "The main reason was the drains were blocked and the sewage was overflowing in the prison, and they couldn't pray, so they rioted."
The prisoners who did not rebel were locked in a large room. "They played loud Arabic and Iraqi music for two days, so we wouldn't hear the shooting. Ambulances came and took the bodies."
Now US forces in Iraq risk confrontation with these same Iraqi Shias, hardened by 20 years of resisting Saddam's regime. The more moderate Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, led by the Tehran-based Ayatollah Mohamed Bakr al-Hakim, boycotted the political meeting that was due to start under US auspices near Nassiriya yesterday.
Fresh graffiti around Baghdad praises the Dawa Party's "martyr" Mohamed Bakr al-Sadr, and the sprawling Shia slums of north Baghdad have been renamed after him. It was to liberate Dawa members in Kuwait that Lebanese Shias began taking western hostages in the 1980s.
As we talked in the secret police headquarters in Kadhimiya, Mr Hussein repeated the increasingly strident message of Iraqi Shias. "I did not accept the regime but I do not accept American occupation either."
At that moment, a US convoy rolled by on the Tigris corniche beside us. "The Americans say they have broken our chains; they can go now. If they stay here, they will be another dictatorship."
Upstairs in the torture villa, a tall, thin man named Sabah Mizher searched through the filing cabinets in the main front room. His brother Salah, a university student, was arrested and brought to the villa in 1981. Mr Mizher found no record of him, but he showed me a photocopied Iraqi intelligence report, dated 2003, on how to exploit differences between Shia clergy.
Mohamed Aish Jassem (30) had returned to the villa to see where he was tortured. "I was a policeman," he explained. "On the 26th of April 2002, I got drunk and I insulted Saddam Hussein. They brought me here, and an officer named Amar al-Issawi had them tie my hands behind my back with electrical wire and winch me up, with a machine, by my hands, until my shoulders were breaking."
Every ceiling in the torture villa has at least one thick, heavy hook; there are three in the room where Mr Jassem was tortured. "They beat me with sticks while I was hanging, and they pulled off my toe-nails."
When he was freed six months later, Mr Jassem went into hiding.
Perhaps the most shocking thing about the Kadhimiya secret police station was the banality of hanging people from the ceiling to beat them. A hook hangs in the downstairs reception room with the fireplace. In the upstairs room with three hooks, red wallpaper was taped over the bay windows, to prevent passers-by seeing. There was a sofa, desk and filing cabinets in the room. You can imagine mokhabarat drawing up reports or drinking tea, while bodies swung from the ceiling beside them.
But the administrative heart of Saddam's reign of terror was in Mansour, at the huge General Intelligence complex, a veritable city within Baghdad. I had unwittingly visited the perimetres of the Mansour complex twice before, with the erstwhile ministry of information. During the US bombardment, they took foreign journalists to see a bombed telephone exchange, the destroyed Syrian pavilion of the international trade fair, and a slightly damaged maternity hospital, all adjacent to the Iraqi equivalent of the CIA.
At first, my taxi driver refused to enter the complex. "Saddam isn't deadyet," he said. "Before, if you looked at the gate, they'd arrest you."
Even the looters who picked over the intelligence headquarters seemed nervous. One joked that a door was closed "because they're having a security meeting."
Inside, much of the complex resembled a holiday village with cosy apartment blocks for Iraq's chief torturers and their families to live in. The vast main building was flattened but I found bales of shredded documents in annexes, the file of an Algerian woman living in Baghdad - the regime kept files on all foreigners - even an essay in English on Samuel Beckett in the school reserved for the children of secret policemen.
In other buildings there were army boots and uniforms scattered among ammunition boxes and overturned furniture. Dismantled Kalashnikovs covered a table in the weapons repair shop.
One man was obviously not a looter. He turned out to be a former nuclear scientist, who managed to leave the weapons programme after the 1991 war. He was nonetheless convinced that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction.
"I came here to see the house of evil," he said. "This was the most feared place in Iraq. This is the first - and I hope the last time - that I'll ever come here."
The scientist did not want to be quoted by name. "We are afraid the regime will come back," he said. "Many people are afraid the Americans will bring him back. It's incredible that the entire government got away. Not one minister has been arrested. I think they have some kind of deal."
I heard the same theory a few blocks away, beside the huge crater where the US dropped four 2,000 lb bombs in the last days of the aerial bombardment, on a tip-off that Saddam and his sons might be there. At the time, US officials said they would conduct DNA tests to determine whether Saddam was killed in the bombing.
"No, he is not here. He is the Son of America - they saved him," an electrical engineer named Ahmad Mohamed said bitterly as he walked away.
A black banner commemorates the 14 civilians who died in the Mansour bombing. On Monday, Iraqis found part of a baby's body in the rubble. They put a black cloth over it held down by white stones.
The Americans have been in Baghdad for a week but none have come to excavate the Mansour crater.
"If he is really here, then where are the Americans?" Samir Abdul-Wahab, a mechanical engineer demanded. "If they thought he was here, they would search every little piece."
And they would have found the dead baby.