IRAQ: MOSQUES ARE GARRISONS, TORTURE AND EXECUTION CHAMBERS

Slaughter in the mosque: a new terror for Iraqis
Ned Parker and Ali Hamdani, Baghdad

Executions held in prayer rooms
Survivor freed after ransom paid

Hassan Mahmoud has the build of a bouncer. But as he sits on a couch and talks about Iraq’s secret religious prisons his broad frame shakes, he clutches himself and weeps.

“It hurts me when I remember what happened,” he says, recalling his brush with death inside a Shia prayer room where he witnessed the beheading of a fellow kidnap victim.

In the war for Baghdad, mosques serve as garrisons. Sunnis use religious sanctuaries as strongholds to fight for mixed neighbourhoods. Shia extremists convert their mosques and prayer rooms, called husseiniyas, into execution chambers.

As Iraq falls apart, people like Mahmoud are now terrified by Baghdad’s places of worship, which they regard as potential gulags and gallows in the Sunni-Shia war.

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Pertinent Links:

1) Slaughter in the mosque: a new terror for Iraqis