“Twenty five years ago,” he begins, ..., “my brother Samir was playing football in a field here in Basra. On the highway nearby passed a convoy of Baath-party officials. Someone shot at the Baathi — or perhaps simply fired a weapon in the air, who knows? Unsure who was responsible or why, the Baathists arrested everyone playing football and took them to prison.”
Months went by, and the government refused to say what happened to Samir. With his family growing increasingly distraught, Ali took the hazardous step of visiting the party’s Basra headquarters to ask about his brother’s whereabouts. . . . “I was sent to prison for trying to find out if my brother was alive or dead,” Ali says.
At one point in his imprisonment, the Baathists took Ali to a “special” interrogation room, and ordered him to strip off his clothing. The interrogator then offered Ali a choice — either he allowed torturers to shove a large bottle up his rectum, or hammer a nail into his back. “I chose the nail,” Ali recounts in a flat tone. Twisting in his chair, he lifts up his t-shirt to exhibit a quarter-sized lump in his shoulder blade. “Believe me, sir, you have not felt such pain.”
Nine months later, the Baathists released Ali from prison — without, however, disclosing Samir’s whereabouts. Not until the collapse of Saddam nearly a quarter century later did information about missing Iraqis began to filter out to the public. “I met a man who was imprisoned with Samir,” Ali relates. “He said that my brother had gone crazy and began shouting — excuse my language, sir — ‘F**k, Saddam! F**k him! Why is he f**king us like this?’ Because of that, the regime sentenced him to death in a ‘slicing machine.’”
Paging Amnesty International.
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