The scars of Abu Ghraib

BAGHDAD — Taleb al-Maleji sits on a carpet and concentrates on smoking a cigarette to keep from biting himself.

The sleeves of his checkered shirt end just above his thin wrists, which are black and purple in spots. The scars are not from the year he spent in Abu Ghraib prison but from compulsively biting his wrists and fingers when he thinks about his time there.

"When I remember it now, I just want to set myself on fire," says Maleji, who was among the Iraqi prisoners stripped, bound and placed in a human pyramid in a photo that became a symbol of post-war U.S. human rights abuses.

"I want to forget but I can't," he says. “I think of it when I sleep, when I'm awake, when I'm at work — the same scenes keep playing inside my head."

Maleji says he was arrested by U.S. troops in 2003 while traveling from Baghdad to Ramadi. He was planning to visit a Sunni uncle there who he hoped could help his marriage.

Like many Iraqis at the time, Maleji, who worked as a laborer, was in a "mixed" marriage. He is Shia; his then-wife was Sunni.

Maleji says he was picked up by troops who hooded him and placed him in the back of a military Humvee.

After spending time in a series of camps, he was taken to Abu Ghraib. He was blindfolded, but Maleji says he could hear the voice of a woman the prisoners called “Linda” – an Arabized version of Lynndie, the first name of Lynndie England, one of the U.S. military police later imprisoned for the abuses.

Malji spent 16 months in prison before he was finally released. No charges were ever filed against him.

In April 2004, photos emerged showing prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. The images showed US personnel intimidating and threatening prisoners with dogs and Iraqis hooded, naked, and forced into humiliating positions. Later lawsuits filed by Iraqis also alleged physical and sexual abuse, electric shocks, and the conducting of mock executions.

Maleji’s speech stumbles in shame when asked what happened to him there.

"I was one of those Linda forced to be naked," he finally says, referring to England. "There were sniffer dogs and sound bombs. They would take off our clothes and splash cold water in the cells in winter on our blankets and clothes so we couldn't sleep or sit."

After he was released, another former inmate showed Maleji a photograph of the men, arranged in a pyramid, with a smiling England posing behind them.

"It's hard for me to say this," Maleji exclaims, biting his lip as he describes another incident. "We were totally naked and they were beating us with sticks on our genitals."

Eleven soldiers of a military police battalion were eventually charged with assault and dereliction of duty. Army Specialist England was sentenced to three years in prison. Her then-fiancé Charles Graner, also in many of the photos, received 10.

Several dozen former inmates settled out of court with a U.S. military contractor accused of being involved in the abuse. A U.S. district court in June ruled it had no jurisdiction to hear a lawsuit by former Abu Ghraib inmates against another U.S. military contractor, since the abuses were committed outside the United States.

Maleji was one of those who simply faded away, returning to Sadr City after he was released, too sick to work.

He returned a broken man, to a broken family. His wife moved out after he was imprisoned, leaving Maleji's elderly mother to care for the couple’s four children.

"I didn't recognize my father when he came back. He was different - he was so weak," says Hawra'a, his eldest daughter, now 17.

Hawra'a and her eldest brother Karrar dropped out of school when their father was jailed.

"I could see that my grandmother was getting old so I started cleaning and washing the younger children's clothes, just like my mom and grandma used to do," says Hawra'a. "I swear I was going crazy — there wasn't enough time to go to school or take exams."

When her teachers asked to see her parents or offered to tutor her at home to improve her grades she would make up excuses. "I can't tell them my mother left, I would say 'she's sick' and then they would say 'what about your dad?'"

It became easier to stay at home. For the past few years, she has stayed in the house, cleaning and waiting for her younger brother and sister to come home and tell her about their day. She says she would have loved to have finished school and gone on to college, but feels like it’s too late.

"I don't go out or visit friends because my friends talk about studying and then what can I say to them?" she says.

Maleji's youngest daughter, Ethar, 14, says she dreams of being an artist and traveling the world. Wearing a pink headscarf and black cloak, she sits at a plastic table in their makeshift house and draws cartoon characters with crayons.

More than anything, she wants a normal home.

"I want to be happy like other families who have fun," she says peevishly. "We even spend feast days at home."

Like Hawra’a, she says her father returned a changed man.

"He wakes up anxious and screaming," says Ethar, speaking about her father as if he weren't there. "He wants quiet, he doesn't want anybody to talk. Its not like in the past when he was laughing and talking - now he keeps thinking quietly and doing that stuff with his hands."

The Iraqi government says it has no programs to assist former prisoners such as Maleji. But its human rights ministry is registering people in the event Iraq is compensated for abuses by the US military and its contractors.

Asked if he has seen a doctor to help him stop biting himself, Maleji shows tubes of skin cream he says he received from a dermatologist.

In the days before so many Iraqi families fell apart, neighbors took care of each other, but not so now. The family's home is on the construction site where a doctor is building her house. Maleji says he struggles to pay her $250 a month in rent.

The two rooms of unfinished brick are covered with giant posters of Imam Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Mohamed, surrounded by children. Mattresses are stacked under the concrete steps to keep them dry when the unfinished roof lets in the rain.

His family is used to not having much. Although he works in construction a few hours a day when he can find work, it doesn't seem to have occurred to Maleji to ask anyone for help.

His mother, in her 70s, has tattoos on her wrists in the shape of bracelets. "We couldn't afford gold when I was married," she says.

Maleji bends down and kisses her on the head. Then he sits down and quietly lights another cigarette.