For Iraqi women, Abu Ghraib's taint

In Iraq, even a whisper of rape is enough to dishonor a woman - and her family. Sometimes families will even kill women who have been raped to "wash" the stain from the family name.

That may be what happened to one girl, rumored to have been pregnant when she was released. "Her father and brother wanted to kill her," says Huda al-Nuaimi, a professor at Baghdad University who is interviewing female prisoners as a volunteer for Amnesty International. "The sheikh of the mosque and the neighbors stopped them, because she was raped, and it wasn't her fault."

But when Dr. Nuaimi went to visit the girl, her family had moved away. The neighbors told her they didn't know where they went - unusual in Aadhimiyah, the girl's tight-knit Baghdad neighborhood. "I wonder whether this girl is still alive," says Ms. Nuaimi, a professor who wears a tiny silver outline of Iraq around her neck. "I think, given this local custom, it would be very difficult for her to stay alive."

Azzawi hasn't seen her mother since Dec. 24th, the day she was arrested with her sister, Azzawi's aunt. She goes to Abu Ghraib and spends hours standing in the dusty parking lot, hoping to be allowed to see her mother. But the guards on duty, she says, tell her, "there are no women here."

In fact, there are three women at Abu Ghraib. Kept separately from the men, with female guards, the women are inside cellblock 1A, the infamous ward where most of the military pictures were taken. "They are living together," says Colonel Johnson, "separated from the male detainees, for their own well being and to ensure their privacy is fully respected."

Declining to discuss specific cases, Johnson could not confirm whether Azzawi's mother and aunt were among those three women. But Azzawi got a letter two months ago from the International Committee of the Red Cross, which monitors prison conditions, telling her that her mother was being held at Abu Ghraib. Like most families of detainees, she still doesn't know whether her mother has been charged with any crime.

On May 14, Azzawi was allowed to visit her uncle, also being held at Abu Ghraib. She took her cousin Raghada Qusay, a 14-year-old with large, sad eyes. Raghada's mother - sister of Azzawi's mother - is in Abu Ghraib, too.

The girls were horrified to see that their uncle's nose had been broken. He told them it didn't matter. "What's important are my sisters," he told them tearfully through a glass window. "They were humiliated. I'm desperate."

They listened in horror as he told them what he said he'd seen: Raghada's mother forced to take off her head scarf. "My mother wears a hijab, and my uncle told us they were dragging her by her hair," says Raghada, her eyes red from crying.

In a torrent of words, she speaks of other tortures: her mother forced to eat from a dirty toilet. Urinated on. As the stories rush out, it's hard to tell what she heard from her uncle and what is prison scuttlebutt.

As Raghada speaks, her 21-year-old sister Hiba breaks in and demands that she stop. Bursting into tears, Hiba runs from the room."I'm not afraid any more," says Azzawi, angrily. "I'll keep talking, even if they take me!"

These days, the girls spend their time taking care of Raghada's 3-year-old sister, and crying over the phone with other girls whose mothers are in jail. They visited another girl they knew, who had just been released from prison. She couldn't speak; they are sure she was raped.

"It's been five months," says Hiba, who has returned. "We haven't seen our mothers for five months. Azzawi is sure they are being tortured. "One day, they'll be released," she says grimly, "and they'll tell everything."

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