Chapter Eight

Mini history of Baghdad

Al-Mansur the Victorious, the second caliph of the Abbasid dynasty founded Baghdad in 762 AD and called it Medinat As-Salaam, which meant City of Peace. It was on the western bank of the Tigris and as it was enclosed within a circular wall it became known as the Round City. Al-Mansur’s palace and the grand mosque were in the centre with four gates in the circular wall opening out onto four radiating roads. Mansour is remembered in modern Baghdad in the Mansour District named after him. By 946 AD the city had expanded across the river and had formed a suburb sufficiently large to rival the Round City. A bridge was built to join the two and in time two more. With the expansion of Islam and the emergence of the Abbasid dynasty Baghdad soon replaced Damascus as the capital of the Islamic Empire and reached the zenith of its flowering in the 8th and 9th Centuries under the caliphs Mahdi and Haroun al-Rashid (Aaron the Just). Al-Rashid left his name in Baghdad as per the Al-Rashid district next to the Al-Mansur district, Rashid Street and the Al Rashid Hotel. Rashid and his court figured prominently in the tales of the One Thousand and One Nights.

Map of Baghdad between 767 and 912AD.

The Arabs controlled the city until February 13th 1258. On that date, the Mongols of Hulagu, grandson of Genghis Khan, destroyed Baghdad by fire. When they captured the city they looted and destroyed all the great buildings and obliterated the Great Library of Baghdad. They killed all the prominent scientists and philosophers as well as 90,000 citizens. The Caliph, Al-Musta’sim Billah was reportedly locked into his Treasury by Hulagu and starved to death. However, the more generally accepted account of his demise is that he was rolled in a carpet and trampled to death by horses as it was believed that the earth was offended by being touched by royal blood. Hulaga spared the Christians of the city as his mother Princess Sorghaghtani Beki was a Nestorian Christian as was his favourite wife Dokuz Khatum.

The city had just recovered from this misfortune and survived until the coup de grace was delivered on July 10th 1401. That afternoon, during the siesta hour, the Mongol Khan, Tamerlane, the Scourge of God, burnt Baghdad to the ground, murdered thousands of its inhabitants and set the region back to the dark ages again.

The name Tamerlane. is derived from Temur meaning Iron and ‘lane’ was added after a battle injury left him lame.

Forensic facial reconstruction by M.Gerasimov, 1941.

Tamerlane was bloodthirsty and brutal. He murdered his enemies by flaying them and burning them alive. He made towers from their skulls and in one notorious episode at Sabzawar live captives were cemented between clay and brick to create minarets; he died in 1405. In 1534, the city entered a long dark night of living death when it became part of the Ottoman empire until 1917 when British troops under General Maude captured Baghdad. From then until Iraqis achieved complete independence the city was frequently disrupted by protests, coups and attempted coups. Many Iraqi patriots made the supreme sacrifice and were hung by the British or British-dominated administrations in Baghdad as insurgents or terrorists.

Baghdad flickered into life again for a short period when Iraqis regained control of their destiny and in the 1970s and 80s it flowered as it was revitalised by the oil revenues. This was brought to an abrupt end by the recent wars which pitched it back again into the desolation of Saddam’s Baghdad.

The Saudi Royal Family gave Saddam the gift of a mega yacht as a reward for fighting Iran to a standstill in the Iran/Iraq war. It is of interest to know that when Saddam named the $50 million, 394-foot long, 7,500 ton yacht he called it ‘Al Mansour’ meaning ‘The Victor’ (over Iran). It also, of course, established a link with one of the legendary warriors of old and placed Saddam right there among them.

The story of the end of the Al Mansour deserves to be told and what happens when the tools of destruction are in gung-ho boys’ hands. Built to Saddam’s specification the Al-Mansour was launched in 1982 in Finland. Its state dining room could seat 200 guests under its huge glass atrium. Saddam’s quarters were near the bow with the mandatory escape route that descended from his quarters into a James Bond type underwater submarine launch pod.

M/Y Al Mansour, flying the Finnish flag as she undergoes sea trials in the Baltic. Note the huge glass dome amidships over the large dining room atrium.

Photo: By permission of Morten Skrydstrup, Senior Naval Architect of Knud E. Hansen A/SNaval Architects٠Designers٠Marine Engineers.

Saddam ordered it to be moored downriver from Basra before the start of the coalition invasion. It was undefended as it was of no military significance. On 25th March 2003, the aircraft carriers USS Constellation and USS Kitty Hawk out on the Persian Gulf launched F-18 air strikes at the yacht and struck the Al Mansour with a number of Maverick laser-guided bombs. One of the Mavericks scored a direct hit on the bridge. The stated reason for the attack was that the yacht was used as an Iraqi Command and Control Centre. This conclusion was militarily illogical and made no sense at all. Command and Control Centres are usually well-hidden and not installed in an undefended yacht in the middle of the Shatt al Arab.

Eventually it was hit so many times that the coalition forces regarded it as a training target. When planes were returning from their missions they were ordered to dump any unused bombs on the Al Mansur. Later 2 GBU-12 (Paveway II) laser-guided 500-pound bombs aimed directly through the glass atrium in the yacht’s top level completed the destruction. Still the Al Mansour floated until it was capsized some months later by local Iraqi Shias who removed part of the bow for scrap. One Maverick should be sufficient to sink the ship and it is a tribute to its Finnish constructors that it was still afloat after 16 such hits. When one considers that the Al Mansour posed no military threat, was undefended and was worth $50 million to the Iraqi nation it seemed a crime to needlessly destroy it.

Canal Hotel and its Neighbours.

The map is derived from the 2006 NGA Map of Baghdad.

At times I had to visit the Canal Hotel in the northeast of the city and attended some meetings there chaired by Dennis Halliday, the UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator for Iraq. The Canal Hotel was built near the Army Canal (Qanat al-Jaish in Arabic) that was constructed in 1959 by Abd al-Kassem Quassim, the former president of Iraq to provide irrigation and drinking water to the locality. This 25-kilometre waterway on the northeast of Baghdad connected the Tigris and Diyala rivers. As it did not contribute to Saddam’s military adventures it was neglected and became a ribbon of stagnant water because of sludge, low water levels and lack of maintenance; it is presently being restored.

The Iraqi Al Sha’ab National Stadium was on the route to the Canal Hotel and as I passed I was impressed at its size and facilities. Built in 1966 with a capacity for 60,000, it is multi-purpose, catering for football and athletics. It must be the only sports stadium in the world with a football hero buried within its walls. Ammo Baba was the greatest striker and football coach that Iraq ever produced. He loved football and Iraq so much that he separated from his wife and family when they went to the United States. Ammo elected to stay in Iraq and when he died he asked to be buried in the stadium.

Al Shaab Stadium.

It must also be the only stadium that contained a Muhabarat prison and torture facility. The 30 cell facility was initially built by Uday, Saddam’s unstable son and manager of the Iraqi Football team, in the basement of the Al Sha’ab stadium. Its purpose to punish underperforming athletes and he used to motivate them by threatening to cut off their legs. (This was no idle threat, as I have images of a man being held down as both his hands were cut off by sword.) If they lost, he had them flogged with electric cable or dragged by the feet along rough concrete in order to lacerate their naked backs. They were then dragged over sand to irritate the lacerations and, finally, they were made jump into a tank of raw sewage in order to infect them. If one was unlucky enough to miss a penalty or contribute to an own goal then one would incur a whipping with thorns on the bare feet or footballers were made to kick concrete balls. Players who incurred his displeasure were made to wear an iron mask not unlike that worn by Ned Kelly the Australian outlaw and keep it on for hours in an ambient temperature of 50oC. Uday used to encase poorly performing naked players in a man-shaped metal gibbet body casket, made of a framework of riveted flat iron strips, and expose them under the searing Baghdad sun where the hot metal casing used to roast their flesh. This type of cage was used in medieval times to contain the bodies of executed criminals as they were hung beside the highways as a warning to others.

All of these torture implements can be seen on the internet and their use is also horrifically and graphically displayed on videos thereon. With Al Sha’ab’s well-furnished stock of torture implements its use was extended to punish all opponents of Saddam’s regime. Their tongues were cut out with razor blades, fingers and hands were amputated, pinioned prisoners were thrown from tall buildings and some prisoners were encased in a medieval ‘Iron Maiden of Nuremberg’.

The original Iron Maiden of Nuremberg. Uday had one of these in the Al Sha’ab torture facility.

An example of a gibbet outside The Noose and Gibbet pub, Sheffield.

Photo: Jon Barton.

One of the torture implements found there after the invasion was the ‘Scavenger’s Daughter’. This piece of equipment was invented by Sir Leonard Skeffington, Lieutenant of the Tower of London under King Henry VIII. The name ‘Scavenger’ is a corruption of Skeffington. While the Rack acted by putting the body under extreme tension the Daughter acted by putting the body under compression. It was first used on an Irish rebel, Tomas Miagh, and afterwards on Guy Fawkes. The victim’s neck was first secured in the top collar, the hands in the middle cuffs and the legs in the lower loops. The restrictions caused intense pain from the build-up of chemicals in the body muscles caused by stagnation of blood and eventually the victim would bleed through the ears, nose and anus to an agonising death. It is proposed to build a museum in Baghdad devoted to Saddam’s and Uday’s torture methods and instruments.

Two of my friends, Tom Lynch of Cork and John White of Limerick, were incarcerated in the Al Sha’ab under atrocious conditions during 1990. They had been working in an oil facility near Tikrit in Iraq at the start of the war and were attempting to escape from the country as foreigners were being rounded up by Saddam’s forces to be used as human shields. The foreigners were to be dispersed to strategic sites to deter Allied planes from attacking them. Tom and John decided to try and escape by going to the ancient city of Hatra and then driving across the Syrian Desert west of Hatra to the Syrian border and take their chances in escaping across it. John improvised a compass and it proved quite effective in guiding them across the trackless waste. As they were approaching the border they were captured by Iraqi military who handed them over to the dreaded Mukkhabarat (Saddam’s secret police).

They took them to an hotel in Baghdad to join other Western prisoners. While there their captors decided to which sites their ‘guests’ were to be assigned. One day Tom found a phone with a live tone but without a dialling plate in one of the hotels en-suites. By tapping out the numbers on the phone cradle they were able to contact the Irish Embassy and made their plight known; a Vice Consul from the Embassy came to visit them but could do little for them. They were then witness to the Western captives being led off by their captors to the various sensitive sites where they were to be exposed as human shields. This was done in front of their screaming wives and children who felt that they would never see their loved ones again. Tom and John were led out eventually but to their horror were consigned to a prison where they became part of the Iraqi criminal system. At night their sleep would be disturbed as they were wakened by volleys of gunfire as some of their fellow prisoners were executed; terrified they awaited their turn.

However, after some days they were suddenly removed to the dreaded prison at Al Sha’ab where they were horror-stricken by the continuous screams of the prisoners as their torturers slowly and sadistically murdered them. In the mornings they were witness to the sight of mutilated bodies left hanging in the view of other prisoners after the torturers finished their grisly work. Living conditions were atrocious, they had to sleep on the floor of the filthy overcrowded cell among the decomposing carcasses of rodents. They had to scrabble with the other inmates to pluck morsels of food from the communal bucket. They were eventually told that they were to be tried for attempting to leave Iraq without a visa and for being found in a prohibited military area. The second charge carried a sentence, if found guilty, of 18 years in prison.

Eventually they were despatched to Mosul by bus to stand trial at the High Court there. Before they departed one of the centre’s most enthusiastic torturers closed all the air-vents on the bus and they made the long journey north with an outside temperature of 50oC. They were tried at the High Court in Mosul and to their delight were found not guilty. They rushed out of the court where the embassy Vice Consul was waiting with their car to take them on the first link of the long journey home. I worked later with them in Basra. Their story was recorded on the second episode, series seven (2010) of Banged Up Abroad on the National Geographic television channel. I passed Al Sha’ab at least four times every week yet not once did our drivers ever mention its grisly secret.