Iraq: So Much Better Off without Saddam Hussein

The walls of Um Hussein's living room in Baghdad are hung with the portraits of her missing sons.

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Three of her remaining sons were kidnapped by a Shia militia group when they left the neighbourhood to find work. They were never seen again.

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She now lives with the rest of her family – a daughter, her last son, Yassir, and half a dozen orphaned grandchildren – in a tiny two-room apartment where the stink of sewage and cooking oil seeps through a thin curtain that separates the kitchen from the living room.

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She told the Guardian how she had to fight to release Yassir from jail.

Yassir was detained in 2007. For three years she heard nothing of him and assumed he was dead like his brothers. Then one day she took a phone call from an officer who said she could go to visit him if she paid a bribe. She borrowed the money from her neighbour and set off for the prison.

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"We waited until they brought him," she said. "His hands and legs were tied in metal chains like a criminal. I didn't know him from the torture. He wasn't my son, he was someone else. I cried: 'Your mother dies for you, my dear son.' [...] They dragged me out and wouldn't let me see him again.

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Afterwards, the officers called from prison demanding hefty bribes to let him go while telling the family he was being tortured. Um Hussein told the officers she would pay, but they kept asking for more.

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The last call came in December. They demanded a final payment to let him go, by which time, according to Um Hussein and her neighbours, the family had paid 9m Iraqi dinars.

"They asked for 60 hundred-dollar bills. Then they said 30. I begged them and they still said 30. I told them I didn't have it, then they agreed on 20."

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Yassir was released two days later. Um Hussein didn't know it at the time but a judge had ordered Yassir be released six months earlier.

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Endemic corruption in Iraq has created a new industry in which senior security service officers buy their authority over particular neighbourhoods by bribing politicians, junior officers pay their seniors monthly stipends and everyone gets a return on their investment by extorting money from the families of detainees.

During two trips to the country before and after the US withdrawal from the country on 18 December, the Guardian interviewed 14 detainees and five officers in different branches of the security service in Baghdad. All the detainees said they had had to pay money to be freed, even though most had been acquitted in the courts. Some had been jailed for three days and some, like Yassir, for five years.

  UK Guardian

Five years of severe torture which has left horrible scars on his back and continual bloody urine for no crime.

[People are] trying to work out ways to protect themselves. [...] In 2008, during the period of intensive American raids on civilians, [Iraq’s Sunnis] had sold their guns and the Kurds had bought them. [Now they] are trying to buy them back.

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Rafic is an officer in one of the most feared security units in Iraq, one of the many commando anti-terrorism units which, at the height of the civil war, had a reputation for being a government-backed death squad.

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Fellow residents in Rafic's Baghdad neighbourhood treat him with extreme caution. They know he has the power to detain their brothers or cousins for months if not years. But they also need him: he is their negotiator and mediator. They know that when someone is arrested they must go to him to seek help. He will arrange a visit, get a phone smuggled into the prison, reduce the level of torture and arrange for their release. Each service will come at a cost.

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His scope of business is not limited to detainees but covers anything related to corrupt officialdom, including getting ID cards and passports.

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"We are neutral," he said, referring to his commando unit. "We don't do Sunni and Shia any more. We are professional. We detain Shia and Sunni. There is no difference."

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"Look," he added, "the system now is just like under Saddam: walk by the wall, don't go near politics and you can walk with your head high and not fear anything. But if you come close to the throne then the wrath of Allah will fall on you and we have eyes everywhere."

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[A colonel in the ministry of the interior’s subordinate told us,] "The commander of the district buys his post from the politicians or the office of the commander-in-chief. Then the commander rents the post of interrogation officer to his juniors for $10,000 to $15,000 per month, depending on the area. For a Sunni neighbourhood you have to pay a lot of money; for Shia not that much, because most of the arrests take place in the Sunni areas. Then you get your money back from the detainee.

"Sometimes you get really lucky and actually detain someone who is in al-Qaida, and then you can get your full investment in one go: you arrange for him to escape for half a million dollars."

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.