| IT ALL BEGAN, SHE SAYS, one day in 1984 when she was huddled in her neighborhood bomb shelter, during one of the periodic shellings of her hometown of Basra during the Iran-Iraq war. One of the other women there took a dislike to her, and that woman was a paid informer for the mukhabarat, Saddam Husseinâs secret police. âThe bitch told them I tore down Saddamâs portrait,â she says. âIt wasnât even true.â The only thing they regime really had on Hashmia was the conduct of her brother, Abdul Karim Jassim, who had deserted from the Iraqi army after Saddam invaded Iran, and died in front of a firing squad in 1982 at the age of 21. In Saddamâs Iraq, guilt by posthumous association was practically an article of jurisprudence. That and the snitchâs report was enough to get Hashmia a seven-year prison sentence. Blindfolded, she never even saw which prison she was taken to. The male warders made her wear pants, an offense to Shiitesâ strict female dress codes; without a belt they often fell down. The low point of every day was the daily torture session; the high point, gruel in a bowl, the prisonersâ only meal. Even that was denied her if âI made some mistake.â Hashmiaâs jailors scored her back with a hot poker, beat the souls of her feet with sticks, made her pull up her baggy pants and whipped her legs. The sexual humiliation may have been even worse than the pain, but that was serious. âThey slapped me so hard that my neck hurts from it even now.â The torturers wanted her to confess to plotting against the Baathist regime, but she knew that would mean a death sentence. After a few months, her tormentors gave up on extracting a confession from her, and she was transferred to Baghdadâs notorious Al Rashidiya prison. The torture stopped, but not the torment. âThere were 46 women in a room this size,â she says. Itâs no bigger than a normal hotel room. âWe slept in the toilet, we lay in our own waste, there were rats and bugs and bats.â Whenever the authorities needed a rent-a-crowd to chant âLong live Saddam,â the prisoners would be bused out of the prison to take part. On his birthday, they were forced to honor him with dancingânot something decent Shiite women do. She says she canât recall a single kindness from her jailors in all those years. âEven the janitors were filthy to us,â she said. âWe were just bugs to them.â |