AMMAN, Jordan - The first time the Iraqi Army arrested him, he said, soldiers burst into his shop in Baghdad, dragged him out in handcuffs and a blindfold, and took him to a filthy, overcrowded prison. Beatings, rape, hunger and disease were rampant . He was held for four months, until December 2008.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JAMES HILL FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

The shopkeeper, 35, a balding, stocky man , was calm and soft-spoken at first, but grew increasingly loud and agitated as he told his story. He described enduring episodes of torture, threats by captors to go to his house and rape his wife, and daily horrors like the suicide of a young prisoner who electrocuted himself with wires from a hot plate after being raped by soldiers. He asked to be identified by only his first initial, M., because relatives were still in Iraq.

After speaking for an hour, he shook his head and said softly: “What happened is not like what I just said. What happened was much worse.” Before, he had a sense of humor, and friends. Now, he has none of that. “I’m not like before,” he said. “My personality changed.”

He was talking at a treatment center that opened in Amman in December 2008 to help Iraqis who were tortured in their own country or who suffer from other war trauma. It is a branch of the Center for Victims of Torture, a St. Paul, Minnesotabased group that also operates in Africa and since 1985 has treated 20,000 torture victims from around the world. About half of the group’s financing comes from contracts with the American government.

Its approach involves intensive talk therapy specifically devised for survivors of torture, using group counseling or individual psychotherapy or both. The group trains local therapists in host countries to take over all treatment within a few years.

The work requires a deft touch. Research shows that trained therapists can help survivors of torture, but that inept efforts to treat them can backfire.

Interviews last autumn - the first time a journalist was given access to clients and therapists at the center in Amman - provided a grim look at widespread abuses occurring in Iraq as recently as 2010, and their crushing effects on individuals and families.

About 400 Iraqis who said they were tortured have been treated at the center. The torturers, clients say, have included the Iraqi Army, American forces, Saddam Hussein’s henchmen, Al Qaeda in Iraq and the sectarian groups, gangs and militias that continue to terrorize parts of Iraq.

The brutality described, “the extreme violence and the intensity and frequency of perpetrations, the layers they might have of traumatic experience, because of the history of their country,” has shocked even Josephine Anthoine-Milhomme, a French psychologist who has treated victims of war and disaster in Asia, Africa and Central America.

“Torture was like a genie released from the bottle, used for any purpose, not just to get information but to send a message to the community,” said Darrin Waller, the center’s former director for operations in Jordan, who set up the branch in Amman.

Psychotherapy can help, but it cannot undo the damage. People find they are changed forever.

“I don’t think you can be totally healed,” Ms. Anthoine-Milhomme said. “You’re just different. You try to adjust to your life.”

The abuses, particularly rape and other sexual violations, engender lasting bitterness and hatred. Some Iraqi men say they would rather die than admit to having been raped. “This will not be forgotten, generationally,” said Mr. Waller, who now works for the British Council as the director of an education program in Baghdad. “It will make the process of reconciliation tremendously difficult.”

Counselors treating Iraqi torture victims at a center in Amman tread
carefully. Torture is the theme of Iraqi art on the walls.

- Dreaming of a Stolen Son

Zahra Farhan, 72, with a lined face and sad, haunted eyes, sat in the living room of an apartment here, beside a table holding a framed photograph of her son Nather. In 2006, when he was 38, he and another of her sons were kidnapped from her home in Baghdad by the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia loyal to the cleric Moktada al-Sadr; Ms. Farhan said they were taken because they were Sunnis.

One son staggered home four days later, covered in bruises, his shoulder broken. He had been allowed to live, the family was told, to carry a message to other Sunnis in the region: Get out.

Nather never came back.

Friends found his body in the street. They washed it, photographed it and showed Ms. Farhan the pictures so she would know he was dead. He had been tortured and shot, she said, weeping. Strips of his skin had been torn off, his teeth yanked out.

The family left Iraq in 2006. She said she lies awake at night; when she can sleep, she suffers from nightmares. Or she dreams of Nather.

“How am I supposed to not think of him?” she cried.

But she declined offers of treatment from the center for torture victims. She has trouble walking, and thought the trip to the center, a few kilometers away, would be too difficult.

Her husband died long ago, and she brought up her sons alone, saw them graduate from college and marry.

“I raised them with the tears of my eyes, and look how these devils came and took them,” she said. “They were just gone, overnight.”

Unrelenting Torment A 37-year-old man who asked to be identified only as R. said that in 2009 he was kidnapped from a street in Mosul - blindfolded, handcuffed and thrown into the trunk of a car by assailants he thought were members of Al Qaeda in Iraq.

Speaking through a translator, he said he was taken because his sister’s husband worked as an interpreter for the American forces; the husband had already been given asylum in the United States.

He was held in a small room jammed full of prisoners, including a woman, Mariam, whose husband also was an interpreter for the Americans. She was tortured in front of the other prisoners. The captors beat her, threw water and salt on her and tied her to metal bars that were attached to the wall and electrified via a generator.

“They raped her more than once in front of us,” R. said, looking down as he spoke. “We wanted to help her. We gave her water. But we could not help her, because they were there. I gave her water. She was probably Christian.

“And then she died, two or three days after she was raped. There were four guys who raped four of us. They asked for information about my sister’s husband.”

When R. said he had no information, the captors tortured him with electric shocks, using the same apparatus they had used on Mariam.

During the interview, R. stood up, turned and partly removed his shirt to reveal a fist-size lump between his shoulder blades - a result, he said, of having his hands tied behind his back and then jerked up and hung from a bar in the wall.

Nearly a month into R.’s captivity, American forces attacked the building where he was being held. Amid fierce fighting, the captives discovered that the door had been left open. Some, including R., decided to make a run for it. He escaped, and then fled to Jordan with his wife and daughters.

“I was destroyed,” he said. He felt cut off from everyone around him, even his family. He stopped shaving and cutting his hair, and sat around the house in a cloud of despair.

“I was tortured and raped more than once,” he said. “It feels as if something is missing. I don’t mingle at all with people.”

His wife still does not know the details of his torture, or that he was raped. Only the therapists know, he says. Even with them, he initially only hinted at it.

“I am ashamed,” he said.

The treatment has gone on for more than a year, far longer than usual. But he said he was still depressed and frustrated.

“It’s as if I am now an emotionally damaged child,” he said. “I don’t sleep. I think a lot. I’m smoking and drinking coffee.”


- Between Heaven and Hell

Jamal, a 43-year-old farmer from Fallujah, said he was arrested by American forces in December 2003 at the home he shared with his wife and three small children, one of them disabled by spina bifida. He was arrested, he was told, because the soldiers thought a sniper was firing at them from his house . He was taken away without shoes, a great humiliation for an Arab man.

Jamal has a copy of a document in English and Arabic that recorded his imprisonment. It was a “MultiNationalForces MNF-1 verification of detention” card bearing his name and a serial number. It said he was detained from December 15, 2003, until May 1, 2005.

For the first week, he said, he was held standing up in a tent with a hood over his head, and the soldiers guarding him were ordered to let him sit for only five minutes an hour. The hood was removed only when he was fed. But he said two soldiers were kind, giving him water and letting him sit when the officer in charge was not around.

Three times he was taken to an officer to be interrogated. The interrogators took his clothes off, supposedly to look for tattoos. In the second interrogation, he said, the officer repeatedly hit him in his genitals with a baseball bat. During the third interrogation, the officer used an “electric stick” on his arms and legs.

After seven days he was transferred to another military camp, where he was allowed to use the bathroom only twice a day, and soldiers went with him. On the way, if he raised his head , they would hit him. After leaving him in the bathroom for only a minute or so, they would throw stones at the door or barge in.

Two men and a woman interrogated him. His wrists were tied and fastened to the wall above his head . He was left in that position all night in a corridor, and periodically beaten. The next day, he said, the female interrogator shouted and hit him.

She sat on a table close to his chair and rested her legs on him so that his head was between her thighs, near her crotch. She wore pants. She cursed at him in Arabic. Jamal said he knew she was trying to do the most humiliating things possible to him as an Arab man.

After the fourth day, he was taken to a prison: Abu Ghraib. Despite the widely reported abuses there around this time, Jamal said he was treated better than in the previous camps. But it was winter, and the prison was crowded and muddy.

There were two meals a day: bread and cheese, then rice and soup. He was cold and so hungry that he sometimes ate toothpaste and scraps of newspaper. Then he and many other prisoners were moved to another prison, Buqa. In April 2005 he was taken to Ramadi and released.

He and his family came to Jordan in 2008. It was like moving from hell to heaven, he said, but he still had vivid nightmares of jail. Therapy at the center for torture victims has helped, he said.

Because Jamal did not want his full name revealed, the United States Department of Defense could not comment on his claims. But a spokeswoman, Lieutenant Colonel Tanya J. Bradsher, said by e-mail: “It was and continues to be against the law and DoD policy to mistreat detainees no matter where they were held. ”

Jamal receives money from the United Nations to help support his family. Last fall his son was flown to Boston for spina bifida surgery. He hopes to move to the United States, but so far his applications have been denied.

Many Iraqi torture victims and other refugees in Amman, like this
painter, are awaiting resettlement, often in the United States.


By DENISE GRADY