Torture and killing of a Sunni by his childhood friends
by Hala Jaber
A letter written by a young Iraqi woman about her brother’s brutal murder vividly illustrates how even lifelong friends are turning on one another in Baghdad’s bitter sectarian strife.
Rasha al-Duleimi, 26, describes the torture and killing of Seif, 23, by two of his childhood friends.
The rest of the family, all Sunnis, had left the mixed neighbourhood of Hay al-Risala in southwest Baghdad after the Shi’ite controlled Mahdi Army had killed their grandfather and an uncle.
As the breadwinner, Seif remained in Baghdad to run their grocery shop. Rasha stayed on to look after him. He assured her that despite the sectarian tensions he would be safe among his childhood Shi’ite friends.
On May 10 Rasha had an intuition and begged him not to go to work. “I knew when he left that day that he would not be coming back,” she recalled.
A telephone call an hour after Seif had left confirmed her instinct. “It was one of his oldest friends, it was the voice of Ahmad, our neighbour,” she recounted.
“We have him,” he told her and laughed before hanging up.
She knew exactly who the kidnappers were.
“I begged them in the name of humanity, in the name of our childhood friendship,” she wrote, “but they refused to heed my cries.”
Seif’s uncle, also called Ahmad, drove to Baghdad to negotiate with the captors but was taken hostage himself. After several hours, a telephone call confirmed that both men were dead.
“You will get back your loved one burnt with nitric acid and drilled to death,” said the caller, referring to the death squad’s favoured methods of torture.
An American patrol took the dumped bodies to the main morgue. Rasha’s mother fainted when she saw her son.
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