Freezing cell, deafening music -- civil engineer in Iraq recalls torture by U.S. troops

BAGHDAD, April 28 (Xinhua) -- An unanswered question has haunted Yasir Mutlaq, a 42-year-old civil engineer in Iraq. "What did I do wrong to be arrested for a year, to be away from my family, and to lose my job?" he would ask.

After waging a war against Iraq in 2003, the U.S. army has repeatedly violated the human rights of Iraqi citizens. Nonetheless, Mutlaq, who had spent a year working in the United Arab Emirates, had never thought such violence would befall him when he came in 2007 to visit his family in Dhuluiya town in Salahudin province.

At midnight on an April day when Mutlaq was asleep after an evening with his children and wife, tragedy unfolded. A U.S. airborne force launched an airdrop operation on a house at the town to arrest a wanted suspect. They searched surrounding houses and made arrests, including Mutlaq, though his house was more than 250 meters away.

"At the beginning of the arrest, they (the U.S. troops) threw a stun grenade, and I don't know how the wooden door was opened by the blast," he recalled in an interview with Xinhua. "They came in a terrifying way. We have children who started to cry, and there was no electricity. All of them were armed with machine guns and had torches."

The troops arrested him at around 1:00 a.m., confined him in a cold cell for three to four hours, squeezed him for preliminary information, and took him back to the cell.

A horrific experience Mutlaq cannot forget came when the troops put him into a freezing solitary cell for about eight days and only offered clothes that barely kept him warm.

"I think it was 10 degrees below zero, and I didn't have enough clothes; they just gave me a light yellow suit, allocated for detainees," he said. "I told them I needed a blanket, but they told me they were not authorized to give any."

When Mutlaq exited the solitary confinement, the U.S. forces took him into detention and treated him, among others, in a humiliating way, leaving him sitting in the sun blindfolded and with his hands cuffed to his back for over an hour.

"I remember a scene at night when they took us to a place with big loudspeakers, and they turned on music and forced us to sit near the loudspeakers for about an hour," he said. "I felt like my head would explode."

For a whole year the U.S. forces detained Mutlaq. He never got an apology or compensation for the tragedy.

"Dozens of people or hundreds were caught for no reason. Where are the human rights?" he said. "There are no human rights, and the evidence is that I lost a year of my life without wrongdoing, and others lost years, and there were some who were killed without reason."

For Mutlaq, the Americans "are promoting these slogans, namely human rights and such concepts like democracy, to the world countries that they have interests in, but when it comes to reality, such slogans are intangible, and the biggest evidence is what happened in Iraq."

When the United States invaded Iraq, Mutlaq thought the Americans would rebuild Iraq, but things became clear later when the forces were creating chaos and stealing the country's wealth instead.

"I was among the people who thought that the Americans were serious about transforming Iraq to be one of the developed countries," Mutlaq said, "but it became clear to us later that they came to Iraq with no plan, only their plan."