As we drove outside Baghdad and saw the twisted burned things on the road, the writer looked out at the scene and said nothing. We didn't know what we were getting into. At the turnoff for Abu Ghraib, Mokhtar told the driver where to go, and directed him toward the gates. Abu Ghraib was just two words to us before we saw it for ourselves. It is a prison city, a gulag, a mass grave. It is enormous, enclosing at least four square miles, surrounded by high walls and guard towers. The words inscribed over the prison read, "No life without the sun, no dignity without Saddam." We were about to be presented with evidence of an extraordinary crime. It would fill our eyes, noses, ears.

Mokhtar left Abu Ghraib in the general amnesty in late 2002 after eight years. The news ran a clip of dazed prisoners carrying a few possessions out of the place while women, mothers, wives and sisters held photographs of their missing, demanding answers about their fate. On Monday, April 28, he went with us back to the prison to show us his cell. Inside it there were places he wanted to go.

The light was failing and by the time we reached Abu Ghraib it was late afternoon. Once through the gates we saw the looters driving around the complex taking anything of value. There were people driving pickup trucks and earthmovers, children running from place to place. Whole families wandered around looking for scrap they could carry out and sell. Packs of wild boys carried lengths of conduit and walked down the corridors smashing windows for fun. When we said hello, the boys would stop and greet us in a cheerful way. From time to time there was a rifle shot in the complex but no one paid attention.

Hamid al Mokhtar led the driver to the building that held the execution chamber. It was a low structure near the high outer walls of the prison. Inside there was a room that looked like a garage built on two levels. A ramp went from the lower floor to an upper floor about halfway toward the ceiling. A prisoner walked this ramp to a loft where there were two trap doors in the concrete, and above those two trapdoors, there were two thick ropes, like the kind used for securing ships. There were no lights and the windows were slits in the concrete walls. The execution chamber had a smell and I cannot describe it. An executioner pulled levers to release the trapdoors and kill the men. What struck me about the nooses, aside from the fact that the looters had avoided touching them, was how well-used they looked. The nooses looked blackened and greased.

We saw the place where the bodies were stored, we saw the bathrooms where the men were allowed to wash themselves one last time. We saw further implements of torture demonstrated for us by a few local men who knew how they worked. As we walked around the chamber Hamid al Mokhtar was quiet and wanted to show us his cellblock, but he was definitely not feeling well. I asked him if his friends had come here and he said yes, and that was all.

Outside in the sunlight, Mokhtar pointed at a large cellblock next to the execution chamber and explained that it once held 500 men, all of them condemned to death.

We drove to Mokhtar's cellblock, and he showed us the exercise yard and looked at the sky above it. Mokhtar showed us where he slept and pointed to a portrait of Saddam on the cellblock wall and said that he is the last prisoner left in Abu Ghraib. We laughed when he said it. Down the hall was a room with concrete tables and benches where the prisoners ate, but in time the prison had become so crowded that the authorities were having men sleep on the tables. Mokhtar said that when women would come to visit their husbands, the guards would leave them in the refectory and the prisoners would protect the couple from the guards while they had sex. "There were a lot of babies born that way," said Mokhtar, "We called them the children of Kanay." Kanay is a nickname for Abu Ghraib.

On our way out of the cellblock, we passed a wall where a door and a window had been bricked over and then covered with a steel sheet. Mokhtar was curious about what was behind the brick. Through a hole in the wall we saw another wing of the prison that looked the same as the others. There wasn't any access to it from our wing; it had been blocked off. The exercise yard was closed off as well, and only recently opened by looters who had torn down a wall. "There is something we called the closed department. The men in the closed department could not receive visitors. No one could have contact with them. And when the amnesty came, it did not apply to them, and they were all killed," Mokhtar said.

Earlier, we asked him how the country's violent past should be handled. He replied, "We don't want revenge, we want the judgment of the law and not of the person. I feel now that maybe there are no intellectuals, and that some people will try to kill the people responsible for this."

On our way out of the prison, we went outside to a place where a man said he saw a body buried. When we found the place there was the sweet, rotting smell. We looked down into a pit with pieces of corrugated steel and a swarm of flies. It was Mokhtar who stepped down into the pit and moved the steel sheet so we could see what was underneath it, because we were afraid to look. The stench was terrible here, much worse than the other places. Worse than the graves at Mosul. After Mokhtar, the novelist, pulled the sheet away from the pit, there was a decomposing body that had been eaten by dogs. The man had been killed recently. There were other corpses buried there but we did not look. Mokhtar looked at the pit but didn't say anything. We moved around and didn't know which questions to ask.

Near the pit with the corpses, there was a freshly dug trench, about 60 feet long and empty except for water. The people who killed the men did not have time to put them in it. I had seen these before outside of Mosul, exactly the same method of burial. We looked around and saw that new foundations were being laid for new cellblocks. Abu Ghraib was still growing when it finally died.

I asked Mokhtar what he thought should happen to the place, and he said, "It should be completely destroyed, every brick."

What was he writing now? "I am writing a collection of poems called 'Under the Red Sun.' It is a eulogy for our lives," said Mokhtar.

In May, 2003, I was traveling with a colleague, the Dutch author Minka Nijhuis, when we arrived at the meeting hall for the Iraqi Writer's Union. A man inside was about to be elected president of the organization, the first time the group had held free elections in a very long time. The man was the Iraqi poet, Hamid Al Mokhtar, and he would be our introduction to the literary culture of Iraq.

Al Mokhtar had spent eight years in prison under Saddam and had been tortured. We returned to Abu Ghraib so he could describe what he witnessed there. Later, when I learned that Abu Ghraib was again being used as a prison by the American forces, I was shocked that the authorities would convert a symbol of the brutality old regime to serve their own purposes. Al Mokhtar said prophetically that it should be torn down, without a brick left standing.

This story originally appeared in Salon.com.

LEAD IMAGE: April, 2003, Baghdad, Iraq. In the immediate aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Baghdad was thrown into confusion as members of the old government fled without anyone to replace them. U.S. forces, spread extremely thinly, were given order not to interfere with bands of looters stripping and burning buildings.
Photo: Sion Touhig

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