The Tasfirat Prison

This prison was located in a former school in the Faisaliyya area of Mosul. The high school was built in 1959, and was converted into a prison after the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. The American forces detained people charged with security offenses and considered ‘terrorists’. The detainees were held here temporarily pending trial, then were transferred to other prisons. When ISIS captured Mosul in 2014, it seized control of the prison and used it to detain local people it considered a security risk. The design of the building was not changed by ISIS. According to a former detainee in the Tasfirat Prison, ISIS appointed Abu Hareth, a former agent of Saddam Hussein’s security apparatus, as a judge in the prison. Abu Barzan al-Hadidi was made his assistant. In his interview with the ISIS Prisons Museum, the witness says that detainees were not usually brought before the judge separately, but that the judge came at night to insult them and to slap whoever argued with him. The witness saw the public execution of a detainee in the prison yard, after the judge had sentenced him to death by beheading. The witness also reports that anyone who complained about the religious lessons that ISIS imposed on the detainees was taken to a torture room. The detainee would spend three days in that room, then return to the to cell with visible scars and bruises from the torture. The Tasfirat Prison was damaged during the battles to expel ISIS from Mosul. After the ISIS withdrawal from the city in 2017, the building was reconstructed. It then became a temporary detention center used by the anti-terrorism department of the Iraqi government.