Unusual suspects: what happened to the women held at Abu Ghraib? The government isn't talking. But some of the women are.(Cover Story)

ON THE MORNING OF SEPTEMBER 24, 2003--FIVE weeks after the suicide bombing of a United Nations compound in Baghdad killed 23 people, including top envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello, signaling an intensified phase of Iraqi insurgency--a group of American soldiers burst into Selwa's villa near the banks of the Tigris River in Samarra, Iraq. Samarra, at the time, was under siege; after the team burst in, one of the soldiers pointed his rifle at Selwa (she asked me to use a pseudonym), a 55-year-old wife and mother, and her daughters and grandchildren began screaming. She, and everyone in the villa, was terrified--and with good reason. The soldiers had raided their house exactly four months earlier, and she remembered vividly what had happened that night.

On May 24, 2003, three weeks after George W. Bush had declared that major combat operations in Iraq were over, the soldiers stormed across the villa's marble floors, rifled through family photographs, and searched inside a French cabinet. They confiscated the family's life savings--$315,000 in U.S. dollars and $12,000 in Iraqi dinar--and then seized Selwa's husband, Saddan, who had been trained as a mechanic and, under Saddam Hussein, had risen through the Ministry of Commerce ranks until he became a director. Ever since his arrest, Selwa had lived in fear that the soldiers would come back to interrogate her or search the house again. But she never suspected they'd take her away, too. "My daughter started shouting and screaming, 'Why are you taking my mother? You took my father!'" Selwa remembers.

On a recent December evening, 14 months after she was arrested, she sits in a room in Le Royal Hotel in Amman, Jordan. Warm and outgoing, she quickly puts me at ease. Wearing a stylish black jacket and dripping with gold and jewels, she looks like the kind of woman you might see in a specialty food store on New York's Upper West Side, bustling around the place and filling her basket with spicy sausages and boxes of tea. She has creamy skin and hazel eyes, and she appears rested despite the fact that, two days earlier, she had embarked on a risky journey through war-torn Iraq to meet me in Amman. She tried to come to Jordan directly, but she found the Jordanian border closed in the wake of a recent explosion. So she drove to the Syrian border, which was also closed, and spent the night. The next day, she made it here.

"The soldiers put me in a Hummer and took me to a police station," she continues, recalling the events of September 2003. "An American and an Egyptian translator interrogated me. They asked, 'Do you know any insurgents?' I said, 'No.' They said, 'Where did you get your money?' I said, 'We have chicken and sheep farms and property.' They said, 'You have something to hide. You are giving money to the resistance. Tell us the truth.'"

Several days later, she was taken in "flexicuffs," or plastic handcuffs, to a detention facility in Tikrit, 100 miles northwest of Baghdad, where approximately 700 male Iraqi prisoners were living in desert tents. After she arrived, she says, soldiers and guards forced her and other prisoners to crouch on the ground with their arms above their heads in 100-degree weather: "They told us, 'You are cowards. You are Saddam's children. You are fighting against the Americans.' If we complained, they said, 'Shut up. Put your face against the wall.'"

The next day, a stocky American officer in boots and a T-shirt told Selwa she was responsible for the disposal of waste. As a former detainee told Human Rights First senior associate Ken Hurwitz during an interview last August, this is a ritual that serves purposes both utilitarian and penal: Human waste is dumped in metal containers, mixed with lighter fluid, and set on fire. Detainees are forced to stir the mixture to speed its dissipation. It's a wretched job, done in shifts by young men and boys, and the stench is overwhelming.

That afternoon, the American officer lit a mixture of human feces and urine in a metal container and gave Selwa a heavy club to stir it. She recalls, "The fire from the pot felt very strong on my face." She leans forward and sweeps her hands through the air to show how she stirred the excrement. "I became very tired," she says. "I told the sergeant I couldn't do it."

"There was another man close to us. The sergeant came up to me and whispered in my ear, 'If you don't, I will tell one of the soldiers to fuck you.'"

She looks down at the floor.

"It is a shame on them," says Riva Khoshaba, a 28-year-old Assyrian American lawyer who was born in Iraq. She is sitting across the table in the Amman hotel and looking sympathetically at Selwa. "Not on you."

Selwa closes her eyes and nods her head, trying to show that she is listening. But it's almost as though she is sitting at a table far away and can hear Khoshaba's words but can't make out their meaning. Selwa nods again and sinks back into her chair.

"I said, 'I will go on.' I stirred for two hours," Selwa says. "Then I fainted."

For Selwa, it was only the beginning of a nightmarish journey. In early October of 2003, she was strip-searched and given an ID bracelet and a prisoner number. She had arrived at Abu Ghraib.

IN THE BARRELS OF …