Abu Ghraib was the scene of the biggest – and most damaging –
breakout in 2013, with up to 500 inmates, many of them senior jihadists
handed over by the departing US military, fleeing in July of that year
after the prison was stormed by Islamic State forces, who launched a
simultaneous, and equally successful, raid on nearby Taji prison.
Iraq’s government closed Abu Ghraib in April 2014 and it now stands
empty, 15 miles from Baghdad’s western outskirts, near the frontline
between Isis and Iraq’s security forces, who seem perennially
under-prepared as they stare into the heat haze shimmering over the
highway that leads towards the badlands of Falluja and Ramadi.
Parts of both cities have become a no-go zone for Iraq’s beleaguered
troops, who have been battered and humiliated by Isis, a group of
marauders unparalleled in Mesopotamia since the time of the Mongols.
When I visited the abandoned prison late this summer, a group of
disinterested Iraqi forces sat at a checkpoint on the main road to
Baghdad, eating watermelon as the distant rumble of shellfire sounded in
the distance. The imposing walls of Abu Ghraib were behind them, and
their jihadist enemies were staked out further down the road.
The revelation of abuses at Abu Ghraib had a radicalising effect on
many Iraqis, who saw the purported civility of American occupation as
little improvement on the tyranny of Saddam. While Bucca had few abuse
complaints prior to its closure in 2009, it was seen by Iraqis as a
potent symbol of an unjust policy, which swept up husbands, fathers, and
sons – some of them non-combatants – in regular neighbourhood raids,
and sent them away to prison for months or years.
At the time, the US military countered that its detention operations
were valid, and that similar practices had been deployed by other forces
against insurgencies – such as the British in Northern Ireland, the
Israelis in Gaza and the West Bank, and the Syrian and Egyptian regimes.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/11/-sp-isis-the-inside-story
