In the heart of Baghdad, the relentless roar of Tahrir Square’s night traffic pulses around a heavy security presence. Under the glow of streetlights, police and security cordons maintain a perimeter around an unusual sight: an open-air studio where the past is being exhumed in real-time. This is the set of Lagal Ranj, the flagship program of Rudaw hosted by the network’s prominent anchor Ranj Sangawi. Starting at 9:00 PM and broadcasting live for two grueling hours, the show serves as a platform for survivors whose lives were shattered by a regime that hoped they would be forgotten.
Before he was a defendant in a cage, Ajaj was the architect of agony at the Nugra Salman fortress. As the primary commander of the desert prison, he was the face of the Ba’ath regime’s campaign for those trapped within its walls. Survivors describe him not as a sick man, but as a “monster” who took active pleasure in the administration of torture.
He was known for carrying a thick, black cable—a tool he used indiscriminately on the elderly, pregnant women, and children. His cruelty was intimate; he did not merely order deaths but often delivered them himself, striking a six-month-old infant with a hose or kicking a six-year-old child over a barbed-wire fence.
In the investigative court, the Butcher attempted to sanitize his legacy, confessing to giving the prisoners “only one piece of hard, dry, moldy, useless bread” for three meals. But the survivors, sitting before the lens in the cool night air, remember a more visceral math. They remember the “salty water” of the desert—a liquid like acid that caused the mouths of children to rot and led to many going blind before they perished.
The Butcher’s theater was one of calculated degradation. Witnesses recount the “black dogs” of the Ar’ar desert—animals that would wait for the sun to go down to dig up the shallow, rocky graves of the recently martyred.