Losing Hearts and Minds in Iraq

"I'm not into the detainee business," said Lt. Col. Nate Sassaman of the 1st Battalion, 8th Infantry Regiment, and commanding officer of the U.S. military base in the Yithrib District of Iraq in what has become known as the Sunni Triangle. "We're really into rebuilding Iraq. I don't like entering houses."

I was surprised to have been granted an interview with Col Sassaman. Ten of us, members of the Christian Peacemaker Team (CPT) located in Baghdad, had accompanied three Iraqi lawyers to the base from nearby Balad, a city in which 60,000 Shiite Muslims living in its central districts are surrounded by 60,000 Sunni Muslims. Without advance notice, accompanied by three unknown Iraqi men, it seemed unlikely to me that we would get access to the base, much less end up in a ninety-minute interview with the commanding officer. When we heard that a captain had been killed the previous week inside the base by an insurgent mortar shell, I was even more surprised Col. Sassaman's decision.

Our team had traveled that morning to Balad, about an hour north of Baghdad, to talk to the local branch of the Human Rights Organization in Iraq (HROI). Since arriving in Iraq before the war, CPT's permanent team has gradually come to focus on human rights issues among civilian detainees. Hence, my colleagues had worked extensively with lawyers from the HROI branch in Baghdad. On their recommendation, we had begun working with lawyers from the Balad branch after Col Sassaman's soldiers had detained two of their members in a nighttime raid. Neither their families, nor other lawyers had been able to get any official information about them, and the Balad HROI requested a visit from us to facilitate communication with the local base.

Welcome to the Occupation

No one is sure how many Iraqi civilians are being held in detention by coalition forces. Estimates range from 10,000 to 20,000 and higher. Most of these detainees are held in centralized prisons like the notorious Abu Grhraib near Baghdad, where Saddam's torturers once did their worst work, but many others are spread out in smaller centers around the country.

Given the chaos of the occupation, just finding out where your family member is being held can be an impossible job. Even if detainees are located, uncertain appointments for brief visits must be scheduled, and waiting times stretch up to six months. Families frequently travel for days at great expense only to be turned back at the gate of a detention center. To be detained by coalition forces in Iraq largely means disappearing from your world.

Arriving at the HROI offices in Balad, we promptly found ourselves in a several hour-long meetings with a large group of Iraqi lawyers. In a room in a plain brick building in the middle of the small, dusty city, fifteen or so lawyers sat facing us in folding chairs. An old man appeared several times to serve the small, obligatory glasses of heavily sweetened hot tea that greet all visitors.

To my American sensibilities, it seemed like a raucous meeting with loud voices and people moving constantly in and out of the room. Although the room often quieted down when one of the lawyers gave his testimony, more commonly, several men would respond at once to our questions, often with raised, sometimes angry, voices. Our hapless interpreter Sattar Hatim Hasan did his best, but I'm sure we missed half of what was said.

Rashad, a local lawyer, told us that, despite promises, there had been no response from anyone at the military base on the subject of the two detained men. HROI lawyers had been treated with disrespect when trying to represent their clients. Other returning detainees, however, said that the two had already been transferred to Abu Ghraib.

Anger and emotional energy filled the room. Each of the lawyers wanted to tell his story of abuse, and so we went around the circle in a disordered sort of way. Mizha Rahanan Khalil, for example, lived 100 meters from the military base. Just after Ramadan, he claimed, U.S. forces had bombed a friend's house, killing five and injuring eleven. Another friend had been shot and killed while trying to pass a military convoy on the open highway. This was just one of several such stories we heard about trigger-happy soldiers on the roads of Iraq. (Just that morning our driver startled us when he and many others crossed the wide median of the divided superhighway on our trip to Balad, tearing the wrong way at over 60 miles an hour down in order to avoid passing an American military convoy. It was safer than risking the ire of some young soldier manning a machine gun atop a Humvee who may mistake a vehicle that passed a little too close for comfort for a suicide bomber!)