Saturn in Cancer : The Rape and Torture of Iraqi Civilian Women

Saturn in Cancer continues to transit, and the stories of abuse against, limitations on freedoms of, and male legislation of the control of the bodies of women continue to grow.

Selwa is a young Iraqi woman whose parents were arrested by US soliders in Iraq. First she watched them be taken away, then they came and took her......

Several days later, she was taken in “flexicuffs,” or plastic handcuffs, to a detention facility in Tikrit, 100 miles northwest of Baghdad, where approximately 700 male Iraqi prisoners were living in desert tents. After she arrived, she says, soldiers and guards forced her and other prisoners to crouch on the ground with their arms above their heads in 100-degree weather: “They told us, ‘You are cowards. You are Saddam’s children. You are fighting against the Americans.’ If we complained, they said, ‘Shut up. Put your face against the wall.’”

The next day, a stocky American officer in boots and a T-shirt told Selwa she was responsible for the disposal of waste. As a former detainee told Human Rights First senior associate Ken Hurwitz during an interview last August, this is a ritual that serves purposes both utilitarian and penal: Human waste is dumped in metal containers, mixed with lighter fluid, and set on fire. Detainees are forced to stir the mixture to speed its dissipation. It’s a wretched job, done in shifts by young men and boys, and the stench is overwhelming.

That afternoon, the American officer lit a mixture of human feces and urine in a metal container and gave Selwa a heavy club to stir it. She recalls, “The fire from the pot felt very strong on my face.” She leans forward and sweeps her hands through the air to show how she stirred the excrement. “I became very tired,” she says. “I told the sergeant I couldn’t do it.”

“There was another man close to us. The sergeant came up to me and whispered in my ear, ‘If you don’t, I will tell one of the soldiers to fuck you.’”

She stirred until she fainted, then she was handcuffed and taken from Tikrit to Abu Ghraib. Yes, you heard it Abu Ghraib