In Iraq, individuals are almost routinely kidnapped and tortured while their families try to raise ransoms. For one Iraqi-Irishman on a visit home, this happened days before he was due to leave again, and he has spent years recovering back in Ireland
“The aim of torture is not to kill the victim, but to break down the victim’s personality,” according to the Centre for the Care of Survivors of Torture, in a summary of insights gleaned from long experience. As the only specialist centre in Ireland providing medical and psychological services to torture victims, the centre has treated about 900 people since it was established in 2001.
A branch of Spirasi, one of the largest immigrant support groups in the State, clients are referred to the centre either by GPs, solicitors or area medical officers, while medical assessments are also carried out for State agencies deciding on applications for refugee status.
Between 10 and 35 per cent of all refugees settled in Europe, it is estimated, have experienced torture or other forms of serious violence in their country of origin. And yet public awareness of the problem is limited, says Spirasi’s strategy and development manager, Greg Straton.
“The situation for survivors of torture currently in Ireland is almost like a Pandora’s box,” he remarks.
“It’s not just about the torture survivor himself. It’s about whole families. It’s about whole communities.”
AN HOUR-AND-A-HALF into a story so draining he once doubted if he could even fully recount it to himself, Laith reaches for his sports bag and says there’s something he wants us to see. It’s nearly lunchtime, and in the spartan prefab in the yard behind Spirasi House, a rambling Georgian building on Dublin’s North Circular Road that is home to the Centre for the Care of Survivors of Torture, the ticking clock is all that intrudes on the silence.
Out of the bag he lifts a clear plastic bag and, inside it, a filthy blue hoodie discoloured by what look like blood stains and a stench so vile Laith feels the need to apologise. “This is what I was wearing when they kidnapped me,” he says, holding it aloft. “I’m sorry the smell is bad, but this is the smell of fear and the smell of death. I got sick when I opened it once . . . That’s how you smell when you’re scared.”
It was fear that led Laith, an Iraqi-Irishman in his late 40s, to leave Ireland and return to Iraq, the country of his birth. In late 2004, when he left his job as a restaurant manager here and flew to Baghdad, the city was still caught in the maelstrom of violence that took hold after the US-led invasion of the previous year. Decades had passed since he had left his country as a teenager, shortly after the series of coups that brought the Baath party to power in 1968, but his parents and his sister had stayed put and now found themselves at home in Baghdad at a time when the battle between occupation forces and the insurgency was overwhelming the city. Concerned for his family’s safety, Laith returned to try to persuade them to leave.
“Things were very bad,” he recalls of his home town in late 2004. “I saw a lot of things there. Burnt people, chopped [bodies], the agony and the suffering of children when their parents exploded in front of them . . . On TV you just see 10 per cent of what’s going on – really and truly.”
Laith’s mother and sister agreed to leave and travelled to Jordan, but his father – a former policeman who has used a wheelchair since being attacked by the newly-installed Baathist authorities in the early 1970s – was more stubborn. He eventually relented, however, and father and son made plans to leave on a Saturday in November 2005. Laith was kidnapped three days before their planned departure.
It was not the first time Laith’s family had been targeted. His nephew and a brother-in-law had already been kidnapped, and he believes it was merely the fact that the family owned a home that made them a target in the eyes of the insurgents. On the night he was taken, Laith’s captors demanded a $500,000 ransom. “It was all about money, but they convinced themselves they were [entitled] to it because they were fighting the Americans. So to hell with us.”
After spending a night in a house in Baghdad, Laith says he was beaten, blindfolded and driven in the boot of a car to a farm outside the city (he remembers hearing cows and the sound of a water pump). The next day, the “hard beating” began, and it would continue for months. Along with up to 11 other hostages (including a father and his 16-year-old son) he was whipped with metal cables, electrocuted, scorched by hot water and kicked until he lost consciousness – a “daily ritual” of unremitting violence that caused its victims at times to wish they didn’t survive.
Their captors improvised to chilling effect, occasionally lining their compatriots up against a wall before running at them so that their bodies were squashed and their heads crushed against the bricks. “After they would electrocute us, they would go out and laugh. They actually made jokes about the sounds we made,” Laith recalls, his speech slow and deliberate. “I had a knife put in my back, just piercing my back . . . And because I did not scream, they wanted me to scream, what they did was they pushed the knife into my shoulder here, and they twisted it. They took it out, put it in, and they twisted it again.” (When Laith produces the hoodie, he points to the holes made by the knife.)
As days became weeks, a grim routine imposed itself. “This was happening every day . . . Some of them really enjoyed it. They lived on it. They wanted to kill. They wanted the blood.”
THEN THERE was the psychological torment – having to watch an elderly man scream with agony for his life or the daily mock executions designed to reduce the hostages into submission. Nightfall would bring temporary relief, with the fighters asleep and their hostages lined up on the floor of an out-house.
“It was freezing cold,” Laith says wearily of those winter nights. “We used to hold each other to keep warm. Because they used to handcuff us to each other, you couldn’t really sleep properly, but you knew you weren’t dying for three hours, five hours. You knew you were left alone.”
He may have pored over the story of those months endlessly, but there are still some aspects of it that refuse to make sense. One is the gang members’ unfathomable tendency to extreme brutality, while showing concern for their hostages’ welfare. They would make a point of feeding the prisoners before they ate their own meal and went out of their way to replenish empty plates.
Laith’s strategy was to try and persuade his captors that he shared their hatred of the Americans. He stressed at every opportunity that he was an Irish citizen, reminding them of the country’s traditionally fraught relationship with its neighbour, and its opposition to the invasion. He feels it had an effect, and attributes their eventual decision to lower the ransom demand from $500,000 to $100,000 to their acceptance that he was something of a kindred mind. When the cash had been received, they congratulated him and told him to get ready to leave. He embraced the other hostages, and he cried. “I felt a sense of confusion and mixed feelings – happiness for my freedom, and extremely sad for leaving them behind. I was unable to control my guilt of surviving alone, not knowing what was to become of them.”
After several months in captivity, Laith was given a taxi fare and dumped at the side of the road on the outskirts of Baghdad. “I took the blindfold off and I fell, and when I tried to stand up, I couldn’t because I was so disorientated. So I sat down for a while, rubbing my eyes. Eventually I struggled. It was like I was drunk or injected with something.” He tripped along the road, pleading in vain for a lift from passing drivers too scared to stop. After some time, an elderly man slowed down hesitantly. “He started driving away, and I said, ‘please, please’. I was crying. I told him I’d been kidnapped.” The driver pulled in. “I got in the car and just said, ‘take me home’.”
Laith spent some time recovering at home in Baghdad before his father agreed to leave for Jordan and he returned to work in Gorey, Co Wexford. “I thought I’d just put it behind me. I thought I’d get on with my life, and I didn’t think much about it, to be honest with you.”
BACK IN GOREY, he returned to work, and life continued on a familiar track, albeit fuelled by heavier drinking than normal. After 10 months, though, he “began to think that things had changed”. Apparently out of nowhere, Laith felt a fear of loud noise, and found himself constantly checking that the windows of his room were locked. He moved to Dublin in the hope that a change of setting might be a remedy, but his problems only got worse. It was impossible to sleep, and he would find himself whiling away the nights by walking the city streets or sitting in front of the TV until he could hear the morning buses. When he did sleep, nightmares were assured. “If I went out at night, I had to take a knife with me. I was frightened, nervous, irritated.” And the physical pain returned.
When Laith eventually visited a doctor to ask for sleeping tablets, he ended up recounting some of his story. The doctor suggested that he visit Spirasi. He was sceptical at first, and therapists at Spirasi describe the man who showed up two years ago as being diffident, sullen, stand-offish, unable to make eye contact – quite the opposite of the man who tells his story with such poise today.
Back then, he would sit in this prefab, and the mere sound of a stuttering exhaust or the thud of a falling pear from the tree above would be enough to unsettle him. Doctors at the centre tended to some physical injuries, and though he felt at times that it was going nowhere, he kept his appointment with a specialist psychotherapist every week for the past two years.
Gradually, he gained an understanding of his condition and gained the wherewithal to deal with it. He now credits Spirasi with having given him another start at life. “When I wake up now, I know where I am. The nightmares are gone,” he remarks. “I came a long way – I’ve been dead and back.”
He speaks confidently, with striking self-awareness, and explains how he has been reading a lot on counselling and psychology lately, with a view to working in the field one day. Last week, at an event held to mark UN International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, Laith stood before a large audience that included President Mary McAleese at Trinity College Dublin, and told a gathering of strangers the story it has taken him two years to put into words. “Life is immense, full of hopes and dreams, to be fulfilled by us all,” he began.