“They took me to Dieray Amin (Security Administration) in Erbil at midnight and tortured me with electric shocks and whipping,” he says. “There were rooms, each crammed with 25 detainees, and still more in the corridor. Each time they brought out someone who had been tortured, we would see his body covered with blood.” “For many of the detainees, it would be six or seven months before they were given a chance to bathe. But one day they took us into a hall and ordered us to take off our clothes to prepare for a collective bath. They gave us ordinary laundry detergent, but when we began to wash ourselves with it, they beat us with cables so that we all developed a painful skin allergy,” says Abdulla. He adds: “They would force us to sign confessions for crimes we didn’t commit and they would make us name any name. After someone signed such a document, they would be shot dead.” Abdulla remembers his hearing at the Revolutionary Court in Baghdad, with Chief Judge Awad Hamed al-Bandar presiding. “The court hall had two doors. If you passed through one of these doors, you would spend many, many years in prison, but if you passed through the other, you would never be heard from again,” he says. “Before my group entered the hall, several people had already passed through the door of death and I heard somebody from the prosecution say: ‘ We’ve done enough shooting for the day and these guys are too young.’ So that’s how we were spared execution, but each were given very long prison sentences.” Abdulla, who was released a year later in the general amnesty of 1986, staunchly opposes the use of torture tactics against detainees - whatever the circumstances surrounding their arrest.

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