Muhammad Hassoun Muhammad Ali

Muhammad Hassoun Muhammad Ali is married and has three children. He used to work as a tailor, but the dress codes imposed by ISIS damaged his business. Therefore, he was forced to sell cigarettes in secret. 

 

In 2015, he was arrested by ISIS for selling a cigarette pack to a young man. Initially, he was taken to a Hisba prison. However, when ISIS members found a mobile sim card in his wallet, he was accused of using GPS to send sensitive locations to Coalition forces. Consequently, he was transferred to the Midan Prison.

 

In his testimony, Muhammad says that when he entered the prison yard, he noticed there were children younger than 13 detained on the charge of sodomy. He adds that he heard the sounds of torture, but did not notice or hear of any women in this prison.

 

When he was taken to the cell, he met a neighbor detained on the charge of selling drugs. The man was a nurse who had given painkillers to people with chronic illnesses. However, ISIS considered these to be illegal drugs. After a short chat with his neighbor, Muhammad learned that the cell was full of ISIS spies.

 

He explains that the jailers were mostly from Mosul, and that probably only one was foreign. 

 

Muhammad did not sleep on his first night in prison. He was afraid of being charged with collaboration, which would mean severe punishment, and that he might not survive his detention. Afterwards, he was tortured for two days in the basement to make him confess to collaboration. 

 

He says that on the first day he was stripped down to his underwear and his head was covered with a bag. After that, he was beaten and tortured with cables and electric wires. He says his body trembled from the extreme pain and cold, especially after jailers had splashed him with cold water. 

 

His second torture session was even more extreme. The jailers tortured him with an electric drill. They drilled holes in his legs and back. As he could not walk, he was carried back to the cell in a blanket. A prisoner tried to stop the bleeding and had to use the prisoners’ worn dirty clothes for that. No medical care was provided at all. Muhammad says that torture and executions were carried out at night.

 

One of the horrific events he experienced was the execution of a former member of the Iraqi police force with whom he had formed a short-lived friendship during his detention. Muhammad also speaks with sorrow about the children who were executed for the charge of sodomy. They were killed by being thrown from a high place.

 

Turning to the food, he says the prisoners were served three meals a day; a piece of bread with cheese and tea for breakfast, a shared lunch in a big dish, and usually lentils or chickpeas for dinner.  Muhammad explains that hygiene was almost non-existent. Prisoners had to go outside to use the toilet, and weren’t provided with any soap or cleaning materials.

 

Muhammad did not confess to collaboration under torture. Eventually, an ISIS judge dropped the charge and sentenced him to 90 lashes, a fine of 500,000 Iraq dinars (around USD 1200), and the monitoring of his phone line. He was transferred to another prison where he spent around 20 days before being released.

 

Muhammad sums up his prison expeBorn in 1986, Muhammad is a married man and father of three children. He was a tailor, but his business was hit as a result of the turmoil Mosul experienced after ISIS control, which pushed him to deal in tobacco secretly.

 

One after of 2015, after selling a young man a pack of cigarettes that morning, he was surprised by a raid of ISIS agents on his store to detain him. Firstly, they took him to the Hisba court, where he surrendered his belongings. They tried to frame him there after finding a SIM card hidden in his wallet. He was accused of cooperating with the Coalition to expose the locations of ISIS agents through the GPS service, which led to his transfer to the Meydan Prison.

 

This man endured torture twice. In the first, ISIS agents put a bag on his head and beat and flogged him with cables or electrical wires. The torture at the second time was more brutal; the jailers used an electric drill and pierced his feet, and back then, they returned him to the cell carried on a blanket. One of the painful stories Muhammad had gone through at this prison was making acquaintance with another detainee, Ahmad Abu Ali, who became a friend despite the short time of their acquaintance.

 

Later on, Ahamad was executed because he hid a gun in his home, especially since he was a former officer in the Iraqi Police. When the prison judge was finally convinced to drop the espionage charge against Muhammad, he was released on the condition of paying a fine estimated by the prison judge with a million and a half Iraqi dinars and being flogged with 90 lashes. He was transferred to another prison for 20 days before his final release.

 

At the end of his interview, he says in summary of his imprisonment: “I saw things that I didn’t want to see or witness ever in my life at Meydan prison.”rience with these words, “I had never seen fear and horror like what I saw in the Midan Prison.” In tears, he talks about his depression and his preference for isolation as a result of his imprisonment. He is still haunted by nightmares about the ordeal.