Iraq: families make their final visits to relatives detained in Bucca
17-09-2009 Photo gallery
For families who used to visit their relatives detained in Bucca, southern Iraq, the journey was always long, perilous and costly, but well worth it. Since October 2005, the ICRC had helped make the journey possible, not least by covering part of the costs. In September 2009, with the American facility at Camp Bucca set to close down, the ICRC ended its family-visit allowance programme. During the four years that the programme ran, almost 30,000 detained people received 146,000 visits from their relatives with ICRC support.
-
Mother-of-three Leila (in a white headscarf) lives in the Adhamiya district of Baghdad. She is visiting her son, Mohammad, 27, who has been detained in Camp Bucca since the beginning of 2008. It has been two months since she and her family last visited him. It is five o'clock in the morning and the waiting room in the visiting families’ section of Camp Bucca is already full. Families arrive very early to avoid the searing summer heat of southern Iraq.
Leila, her husband and Tabarok, her little disabled daughter, have come to visit Mohammad. Fighting back tears, Leila recalls the day he disappeared. “It was a nightmare, I looked everywhere for him until somebody from the ICRC called to tell me that he was here in Bucca.” Since then, Leila has come to visit Mohammad regularly, bringing him family news, photos and letters.
She boards the bus that will take her to her son. A few hours later Leila is back in the waiting room, sad and unable to conceal her pain. “Mohammad was so happy to see the photos", she says. "I only pray that soon he will be reunited with his brothers and sisters.”
According to Leila, the ICRC goes to great lengths to help her, her family and other people with relatives in prison.
For 40 days Suad (left, in black) looked for her son, Mahmoud, who had disappeared mysteriously. She then found out that he had been arrested. She was notified of his arrest and whereabouts by the ICRC in Baghdad. Today Suad is visiting Mahmoud.