Dozens of women are rotting away, imprisoned in a former royal palace without trial or sentence, penned up in cramped cells over charges of murder, kidnap and the new Iraq nasty: terrorism.
The Queen Alia palace in Baghdad, once home to the mother of King Faisal and formerly replete with gold panelling, was rebranded into a women’s prison after the fall of the Iraqi monarchy in 1958.
A teenage girl, dressed in blue prison tunic and trousers, is languishing in one of the cells for acts of ”terrorism” in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq.
Aged 15, her life has been a sob story ever since her mother died of cancer and she was put in an orphanage.
”When the regime fell in 2003, bandits looted the institution and carried off five girls, myself included,” she recalled.
Whisked from Baghdad to the Syrian border, she ended up in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, where she said she was trained in the art of crime at a secret insurgent camp. Life was hard.
”I was drugged then raped. Another time they [the insurgents] slit the throat of an Arab before my very eyes,” she said, trembling.
”I used little cameras to secretly film police stations which were attacked several hours later and I attracted soldiers into ambushes where they were assassinated,” she claimed.
”I was arrested carrying an explosives belt that I was going to activate in a religious place in Baghdad,” she said.
The girl refused to give her name, petrified that even in prison her former tormentors would come and kill her.
In another dank corner, a young woman, dressed in a black abaya (cloak) covering everything except her eyes, squats in silence.
”The American army picked her up six months ago because she was carrying a bag of explosives in Mahmudiyah,” south of Baghdad, said one official from the detention centre. She has never spoken in jail.
In an adjacent room, 28 detainees held on suspicion of common crimes are increasingly frustrated with their lot.
”I came here in February. Before ending up in this cell, I was savagely tortured during interrogation,” said 35-year-old Fatima, the mother of six, echoing common complaints that police are using torture during interrogation.
She is being held in connection with the murder of her friend’s husband, who was working in the same bank as her.
Bassira (40) meanwhile, is accused of killing her own husband.
She has been waiting six months without news of her fate. Since her arrest, her lawyer was killed by gunmen in a shootout in Baghdad.
”I want to commit suicide. Die. Anything except live this life of uncertainty,” said a 23-year-old woman sitting nearby.
Prison officials have set up a television in the room cramped with bunk beds to help the women while away the endless hours of boredom.
But 42-year-old Alia is still furious.
”They threw me into jail for attempted kidnap when it was me who reported the case to the authorities,” she said, enraged.
In another wing live mothers who have given birth inside the prison, their slightly grubby, ill-fed toddlers waddling across the floor.
”I’ve been here with my child for seven months, without a trial,” said Furat (29) accused of having kidnapped her brother.
She gave birth behind bars.
General Jumaa Hussein Zamel, director general of prisons in Iraq, said more than 120 women are waiting in prisons to be tried, calling on the authorities to accelerate investigations and questioning to determine their fate.
Nearly 100 others were sentenced in various cases, one of them an Iraqi woman with a US passport who was arrested at the border for illegal entry, Zamel said.
Last month, a US-led raid uncovered about 170 prisoners at a secret interior ministry jail in Baghdad where at least seven detainees had been tortured and others deprived of food, water and medical care. – Sapa-AFP