They received the information from a remarkable organization called the Association of Free Prisoners. Located in the confiscated riverside villa of a former security official in the Kadhimiya neighborhood of Baghdad, the Association formed right after the war ended. Muhamad Jamal Abdel Amir, a twenty-eight-year-old volunteer, explained that the Association was created by four former prisoners. It was an entirely Iraqi project; the founders had not coordinated their activities with anyone foreign or received any outside help. After the war, when Iraqis began looting the headquarters of the security organizations that had terrorized them for so long, many handed over the files they found to the Association.

On the external walls of the Association hung sheets of paper with alphabetical listings of prisoners’ names. Hundreds of desperate people ran their fingers down the lists taped to the walls, hoping to learn their relatives’ fate. Inside, past the two boys with machine guns who guarded the Association, workers bustled back and forth, their faces blocked by the immense piles of documents they carried to different rooms in order to organize them by subject. They planned to enter all the information into a database, but for now the dozens of rooms were full of thousands of files going back to the 1960s. The files were stacked on top of one another, stored in sacks or kept in their original file cabinets. They were marked “Dawa” (for a banned Islamist party) or “Communist,” or had other labels that indicated independent political activity—all designating the subjects as victims of ruthless repression.

New files continued to come in by the thousands from all over Iraq. One revealed that a soldier accused of joining the Dawa Party in 1981 and criticizing the regime had been sentenced to five years in prison for his crimes. Another file documented the mass execution of sixteen people. Saad Muhamad, a volunteer at the Association responsible for gathering information, explained he was imprisoned for four years for criticizing Saddam. He showed me a Procrustean British-made traction couch that had been found in the general security headquarters. It was used during interrogations to stretch victims until their bodies broke and tore. He also showed me a meat grinder used for humans.