Perspective: Slaughter in the mosque -- a new terror for Iraqis

Hassan Mahmoud has the build of a bouncer. But as he sits on a couch and talks about Iraq’s secret religious prisons his broad frame shakes, he clutches himself and weeps.

“It hurts me when I remember what happened,” he says, recalling his brush with death inside a Shia prayer room where he witnessed the beheading of a fellow kidnap victim.

In the war for Baghdad, mosques serve as garrisons. Sunnis use religious sanctuaries as strongholds to fight for mixed neighbourhoods. Shia extremists convert their mosques and prayer rooms, called husseiniyas, into execution chambers.

As Iraq falls apart, people like Mahmoud are now terrified by Baghdad’s places of worship, which they regard as potential gulags and gallows in the Sunni-Shia war.

In a quiet voice he tells of an ordeal many have suffered but very few have survived. In late August he was waiting for a lift home after registering for a training course at a technical college in southeast Baghdad. His decision to take a minibus would prove disastrous. Before it had gone 50 metres two men and a woman pulled out rifles and ordered Mahmoud and three other male passengers to put their heads down.

Soon he had been whisked into Iraq’s fundamentalist netherworld. The next 24 hours in a Shia husseiniya brought him deep into the world of militiamen — where executions are carried out on a whim and ransom money is extorted from victims’ families.

He remembers how he and his companions were dumped from the minivan and dragged into separate corners of a brick room where three guards shouted at them to keep their heads down and took their phones and money. There they waited for the sayed — the Shia prayer leader.

The sayed wore a black turban and cloak — the mark of a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad — and had a pistol tucked by his side. He asked each man where he was from. The first answered Amariyah — a Sunni enclave that Shia extremists believe is a terrorist den. Mahmoud’s stomach sank.

Mahmoud realised that if they knew he was a Sunni he would die. “I’m from the Mussawis in al-Amal,” he lied, giving the name of a Shia tribe. The sayed warned him they would see if his story added up.

The final two captives were also questioned. Before leaving the sayed asked each one to identify his mobile and give the name of a relative to ring.

First they came back for the man from Amariyah. Then it was Mahmoud’s turn. They put a gun to his head as they pulled his body and dumped him in another room. He could hear the sayed’s voice above him.

The sayed demanded to know more about his family and where they lived. He mentioned an acquaintance from college who had joined the Mahdi Army and was killed recently. One of the sayed’s men whispered in his boss’s ear. “We have our own intelligence. I was there the day of his funeral, tell me about it,” the henchman said.

Mahmoud knew the right answer.

Read the rest at the Times of London