TORTURED BY THE SOLDIERS WE CALL ALLIES
Iraqi photojournalist Ali Arkady thought he was embedded with the good guys — an elite unit of Iraqi soldiers battling Daesh in the name of a united Iraq, strong and free once and for all. But as the battle for Mosul intensified, the Iraqis lost the plot,
The images are merciless: Iraqi detainees slung from ceilings by their wrists like rag dolls; a blindfold to hide the next torturous blow, a gag to muffle the screams.
A glance jolts the sickening memory of Abu Ghraib prison, circa 2003, when the United States army and the CIA let their humanity slip away.
Yet here they are again, 14 years later — damning images from the ongoing battle of Mosul that burn through the fog of war, revealing physical abuse, torture and the murder of Sunni Arab Iraqis perpetrated by a unit of American-trained, coalitionequipped Iraqi commandos on the front lines in the war against Daesh.
Published exclusively by the Toronto Star and ABC News, the photographs and video by Iraqi photojournalist Ali Arkady are evidence of war crimes committed by soldiers that Canada and its more than 60 coalition partners have designated the good guys in the battle against Daesh, also known as ISIS and ISIL.
Documented in Arkady’s images: knives, guns and live electric wires held to detainees’ heads; gloved fingers pressed deep into eye sockets and beneath tongues with muscle-crushing force; video clips of suspects, suspended and beaten, screaming their innocence.
The bond of trust Arkady established with the Iraqi unit afforded such astonishing access that the perpetrators themselves filmed and shared some of the most incriminating footage with him.
Among “trophy” images the soldiers gave to Arkady: a shocking 12-second clip of an execution in which a barefoot suspect tries to flee, arms bound behind him, as two Iraqi officers shoot him in the back, firing nine shots in all; a 20-second clip showing an Iraqi special forces interrogator looming over the lifeless bodies of two Sunni Muslim brothers after a night of torture, snarling, “We crushed them” in revenge for sins against Iraq’s Shiite community.
Between October and December of last year, Arkady documented three increasingly violent and disturbing embeds with a unit of the Emergency Response Division, a special forces branch that answers to the Iraqi Interior Ministry. As his evidence of the soldiers’ crimes grew, the mood within the unit turned perversely against him. In mid-November, as Arkady was beginning to film the unit at its worst, he was twice coerced into crossing red lines with them, ordered to put down his cameras and strike suspects with his own hand. He protested repeatedly, but, in fear for his life, he complied. The blows were soft enough to leave no marks, hard enough to ensure his survival, he said.
Taken as a whole, Arkady’s images strike a withering political and public relations blow to the Iraqi campaign against Daesh — just as victory appears imminent. By virtually every measure, the fight is approaching its final stages, with the selfdeclared Islamic State in control of barely 7 per cent of the territory it once held.
The images published by the Star represent the sweep of what Arkady witnessed, but his work runs far deeper than what you see today. It includes more than 400 photos and hours of videos and audio recordings chronicling the spiralling extremes of the soldiers he accompanied.
During two days of interviews with the Star in Europe, Arkady explained how he thought he was onto a very different story last summer, when he first accompanied the ERD as a photojournalist for part of an earlier mission, the battle against Daesh in the city of Fallujah.
“I saw only the good at first with these guys. There with Sunni and (Shiite) fighting together, uniting against ISIS for all the right reasons,” Arkady said.
“They presented themselves as real Iraqi heroes. In those first three days in Fallujah, I saw it. They were brave. I saw it as Iraq coming together, finally, to win back the soul of the country.”
That first impression crumbled as Arkady gained far more access on the later Mosul embeds, including joining night operations targeting suspected Daesh loyalists. He witnessed, and in the final days was able to film, a jarring range of detainee abuse.
The crimes Arkady documented substantiate warnings human rights organizations and many military analysts have sounded for years: If Iraq and its allies, including Canada, cannot both fight Daesh and work to reconcile the historically divided Sunni and Shiite Muslims, the likely result will be endless insurgencies — a next-generation Daesh. In prosecuting this war without unwavering attention to the kind of abuses Arkady’s images show, Iraq is merely planting seeds for the next one.
For Canada, whose military commanders have praised what they call the “remarkable transformation” of the Iraqi security forces, this evidence of abuse will prompt serious questions about the partnership and backing of the Iraqis.
The Star showed photos and video to Col. Jay Janzen, a senior spokesperson for the Canadian Armed Forces, who said such behaviour goes against the training for Canadian troops and the lessons they are trying to impart to their partners in Iraq.
“As a professional soldier and as a human being, what I saw in the images was, quite frankly, abhorrent and sickening,” Janzen said.
While the Canadian troops who landed in Iraq in the fall of 2014 have had no direct interaction with the ERD, Janzen said any evidence of abuse would be investigated.
“The coalition is doing everything it can to make sure that to the greatest extent possible the law of armed conflict is being respected and in cases where it isn’t, it needs to be investigated and people need to be held to account,” Janzen told the Star.
The worst of the images fly in the face of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which lay out rules for armed conflict and define torture as a war crime.
For Arkady, 34, what he witnessed has been life-changing. He has fled Iraq with his wife and 4-year-old daughter, knowing that the publication of his work may make it unsafe for him to ever return. What he witnessed makes him a marked man. He is a man without a country.
Canada may well be his next destination. The Global Reporting Centre at the University of British Columbia — one organization in a tight circle that are aware of Arkady’s situation, including the Star, ABC News and Human Rights Watch — has invited Arkady to become journalist-in-residence for the coming year.
In the meantime, he has found temporary shelter in Europe — the Star has agreed to not reveal his location for security reasons — where life is a couch-surfing limbo. He moves week to week, apartment to apartment, with his wife and daughter, harboured by a network of photojournalists.
Leading the effort to get him safely to Canada is VII Photo, a San Francisco-based photo agency specializing in conflict photography. The organization has cultivated Arkady’s work since 2014, when it started pairing him with mentors from among the world’s top shooters. The group had hoped Arkady would arrive in the U.S. But when the Trump administration imposed a travel ban on Iraqis in late January, VII Photo looked instead for a Canadian solution.
Arkady had worked as a freelancer on occasional assignments for major publications, such as the New York Times and Der Spiegel. He left the brief encounter with the ERD in Fallujah last summer believing he might have happened on his most important work yet — the kind of longform photojournalism he considers his true passion: following the unit to Mosul, where the crucial battle for Iraq promised to be decided.
Arkady cut a two-minute clip from his Fallujah footage, a trailer of sorts for a hope-filled documentary. He titled it “Liberators, Not Destroyers,” posted it to Facebook and was stunned when it was viewed and shared more than 300,000 times.
The protagonists in that video, Capt. Omar Nazar, a Sunni, and Cpl. Haider Ali, a Shiite, present themselves as close friends, projecting supreme confidence in promising their battles will deliver a better Iraq for all, regardless of sect.
Nazar: “All of ISIS are criminals and psychopaths. Don’t expect us to be cruel to you. We are one of you. And more merciful than those strangers and intruders.”
Ali: “Be happy. Have fun. Go out. Go out. Study. Love. Get married. We are here for you . . . we will secure a happy life for your children.”
The clip’s popularity delighted the ERD’s leadership. Convinced Arkady could do no wrong, they granted him front row access to the upcoming battle.
The First Embed: Oct. 18-29, 2016
Arkady arrived for the first of his three embeds on Oct.18, 2016 at Qayyarah Airfield, a coalition logistics base referred to in military circles as Q-West. There, he witnessed but was not able to film interrogations of suspects at ERD headquarters, just 100 metres from the gates of the U.S. garrison.
“I saw the start of interrogations of two suspects, Ahmed and Ghassan, from the village of Tal al-Tabeh. The ERD Task Force soldiers later told me that the men confessed to being members of ISIS after three days of torture. And that after that they were killed,” Arkady told the Star.
“Yes, it bothered me to hear this. But I didn’t see torture there, not with my eyes or my camera. I couldn’t be sure the soldiers were telling the truth. It was the first sign to me that the story might be something other than what I had planned.”
After 12 days, Arkady returned to his home near Iraq’s border with Iran with a plan to regroup with the unit soon after.
The Second Embed: Nov. 12-Dec. 3, 2016:
Arkady rejoined the ERD at the newly liberated city of Hamam al-Alil, 15 kilometres south of Mosul, on Nov. 12. Over the next three weeks, the photographer’s suspicions about the ERD unit solidified on clearing operations with the soldiers, including on night raids. In a diary, Arkady wrote after he fled, he uses uppercase type to emphasize the turning point. “MY STORY QUICKLY CHANGED. IT IS HERE THAT I BECAME WITNESS TO TORTURE, IMPRISONMENT, ARREST . . . AND KILLING.”
He was not allowed to photograph some of the crimes he saw, including two hours of torture in which a detainee was asphyxiated with a plastic bag.
“The situation was unstable. There was rocket fire, snipers, there was clearing of houses, street by street. Civilians were coming home, crossing (the Tigris River), and the ERD was sorting through them, taking many of the young men aside for interrogation,” Arkady said.
Near the halfway mark of his second embed, Arkady joined and later began photographing a series of night raids on the village of Qabir al-Abid. During one such raid he photographed the Nov. 22 arrest of Rashid al-Mani.
The arrest appears to have been a case of guilt by association, according to Arkady. Al-Mani, a father of two, had an older brother, Basman, fighting with Daesh in Mosul. Basman’s wife, Tagraad, had a reputation as a Daesh enforcer, alleged to have wielded a torture instrument known as “the biter,” a claw-like device, against women who failed to comply with ultraconservative dress codes in public.
“I saw the beginning of the beatings on Rashid. And then I saw his body one week later at ERD headquarters in Hamam al-Alil,” Arkady said.
“He was left lying on the floor behind a door. His eyes were open, his mouth was open. The life was gone.”
Arkady again returned home, deeply troubled by the story he was following — yet astonished at how at how the ERD had given him such free access to tell it.
The Third Embed: Dec. 10-22, 2016
Regrouping with the ERD for a third and final time on Dec. 10, Arkady found himself in new terrain in the freshly liberated district of Gogjali on the western outskirts of Mosul
This time there were almost no limits to what he could film — and what he didn’t see, the soldiers proudly shared, including self-incriminating clips that documented crimes up to and including the execution of detainees. As he gathered both his own images and those the soldiers shared with him via WhatsApp, Arkady sensed danger.
To this day, Arkady still struggles with why the ERD crossed red lines so readily — and why they so casually let him in on their deeds. Was it sheer narcissism? A sense of impunity? Altered states? All of the above?
Most of the soldiers he encountered behaved with conspicuous entitlement, he says, rationalizing their actions as justified by the end goal of crushing Daesh. A majority, he says, also indulged in drink and drugs, including an unidentified pill that appeared to amp the men up for any given task.
“The pills were marked ‘Zero One’ — I don’t know what they were. They offered me one, I said no. They bought them on the black market. It seemed to give them courage. A few of them took too much and they just babbled. You couldn’t understand them always.”
One of the soldiers, Arkady remembers, always kept to the periphery, avoiding any involvement in prisoner abuse. Once, during the photographer’s final embed, that soldier took Arkady aside and said, in a conspiratorial whisper, “You are like me — you don’t like this, do you?” Fearing it was a trap, Arkady maintained a poker face, saying nothing in response. But looking back, he says, “He was a good guy. He was the one good guy.”
“As a professional soldier and as a human being, what I saw in the images was, quite frankly, abhorrent and sickening.” COL. JAY JANZEN CANADIAN ARMED FORCES SPOKESPERSON
It was in the final days of the last embed that the worst unfolded. One especially damning incident involved the torture and killing of two brothers — Laith and Ahmad al-Hayali — after their Dec. 16 arrest.
Arkady photographed the first 90 minutes of abuse before he fled the room, fearing an ERD officer would force him to delete the incriminating images. The abuse continued for another day and night and then, some 30 hours later, one of the two soldiers responsible gleefully showed — and then gave to Arkady — a 12-second clip showing the brothers’ lifeless bodies. Other photos followed, including “trophy” images that reveal the abuse of the two brothers, as photographed by their abusers.
Two days later, Capt. Nazar and Cpl. Ali — the “heroes” of his film from Fallujah — proudly showed Arkady a video clip on their phones. In it, Nazar and Ali shoot a barefoot suspect twice in the back as he attempts to flee. After a third shot, the man drops to the ground, immobile. Nazar and Ali step forward and unload another six shots between them.
Nazar and Ali later shared the video with Arkady via WhatsApp.
“They were proud of it. I felt sick. I felt scared. It was crazy,” he said.
The next night, as the soldiers slept, Arkady crept upstairs and called VII Photo on Skype seeking guidance. He knew he had a strong story to tell. He feared the soldiers would turn on him. The photographers advised him to get out. Arkady told the soldiers his daughter was ill, and he fled. Barely a week later, he had made his way to Doha, then onward to Europe. His wife and daughter soon followed. Arrangements were also made for Arkady’s parents, though he wants the details to remain secret.
Acclaimed American photojournalist Ed Kashi, who has mentored Arkady since 2014, was among those on the call who counselled him to flee.
“He sent me these pictures . . . and I literally started to sob. It was such a gut punch,” Kashi told the Star.
“I’ve been working in this region since1991. It was devastating because it drew into sharp relief that nothing is changing.”
Officials with Human Rights Watch have reviewed Arkady’s images and are mounting an investigation. They intend to interview the families of the detainees and are particularly interested in the parts of Arkady’s work that suggest sectarian scoresettling.
Starting after the fall Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-dominated regime, droves of men and boys joined what later became Daesh in response to waves of abuses carried out by armed Shiite groups, said Belkis Wille, HRW’s senior Iraq researcher. “We, as human rights organizations, have been saying it since 2003, every single year in our meetings with the Americans. ‘If you allow the (Shiite) armed groups to keep perpetrating these abuses you’re going to get a really nasty reaction.’ ”
The kind of violence Arkady has captured risks recreating the same push-factors that made Daesh so attractive more than a decade ago, Wille said. “If we allow the operation to combat ISIS to open the floodgates to the exact same thing that was a key push factor, then you’re not getting a solution to ISIS. Even the most military-minded people I’ve met with get that the solution to ISIS is not just a military one.”
Arkady documented members of the ERD acting as judge, jury and executioner, but the troublesome structure of the unit also warrants scrutiny. The branch is led by Iraqi Maj.-Gen Thamer Ismail, who was arrested and held by U.S. forces in 2007 for alleged involvement in torture and killings by illegal Shiite militias. A U.S. diplomatic cable from the time, disclosed by WikiLeaks, described how “Iran-linked officials” applied heavy pressure to arrange his release.
Farther up the chain of command stands Iraq’s new hardline interior minister, Qasim Mohammed Jalal al-Araji, whose sectarian credentials are no secret. Araji, a veteran of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, is a top leader of the Badr Organization, which waged scorched-earth sectarian war against Iraqi Sunnis after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
Prior to his appointment, Araji’s sectarian affiliations were believed to be of deep concern to some senior Iraqi politicians. But efforts to block his confirmation collapsed in January after Donald Trump ascended to the U.S. presidency and announced a visa ban that targeted Iraqis, among others, before a series of court defeats led the White House to rewrite it.
Candidate Trump spoke glowingly of torture on the campaign trail, stating that “torture works” and even if it doesn’t “they deserve it anyway for what they’re doing.” Trump doubled down a few days after his inauguration, telling ABC News he wanted to “fight fire with fire” when it comes to stopping terrorism because he “absolutely” believes torture works.
Arkady’s images put Trump’s rhetoric to the test. The world will be looking for coalition leadership on these abuses. That buck, whether Trump likes it or not, will stop at the White House.
Arkady says he knows that releasing these images betrays the trust the ERD unit had in him. Most of the soldiers will be enraged. Some will want him dead.
“Some of the men showed bravery,” he said. “Some have bullet wounds all over their bodies and they keep fighting. That was the story I wanted to tell — until it all began to change. Then, deep down, I started to hear another voice, showing me another way.
“I didn’t know what the voice was at first. But through time it became clear to me that it was the voice of my fellow Iraqis.”