When her Iraqi captors told Sara Saleem that they were digging her grave outside her prison cell, the real estate developer and engineer began plotting her escape, eventually using a metal spoon to pry off a window frame and fleeing down a drain pipe to safety.
Saleem, 47, a US citizen of Kurdish ethnicity, claims she was kidnapped, tortured and held for ransom for more than a month at a prison near Basra in a story with all the twists and turns of a Hollywood thriller.
After trying for years to seek justice over her treatment in Iraq, the mother of three is now suing a host of Iraqi government officials as well as terrorist groups Hezbollah and Asa’ib Ahl al-Haqq (AAH) in US federal court for $2 billion.
An amended complaint was filed earlier this year in US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, where Saleem lives with her family.
Among the defendants in the case is Iraq’s chief justice, Faiq Zidan, and former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who Saleem accuses of plotting her kidnap and then covering up the crime.
“He [Zidan] acts with full impunity and is used to getting what he wants,” said Saleem in a Zoom interview with The Post last week from an undisclosed location in the Middle East. “The corruption in Iraq is unlike corruption in any other nation.”
Saleem was kidnapped in Basra, a port city in the country’s southeast, after meeting with government officials about one of her construction projects on September 8, 2014, court papers say.
She said she was overwhelmed by a group of men who surrounded her as she tried to drive away in her own car. The men allegedly arrived in vehicles bearing the insignia of al-Maliki, who was the Prime Minister at that time, according to the lawsuit.
Her assailants pulled her out of the vehicle and when she resisted “they smashed her face with a pistol and tased her,” court papers say. “Once she was restrained, they shoved her into one of their cars and sped away.”
What followed was 43 days of torture involving sleep and food deprivation and blows with electric cords as her kidnappers demanded to know where she had stashed a $100 million loan she had taken out to fund the Safat Basra housing project, a 2,500 residential units develpment near Basra, according to court papers.
Shortly before the alleged abduction, Saleem had been getting frequent calls demanding she donate $2 million to fund the Al-Maliki political machine, according to the lawsuit. In the suit she claims she believes her former business partners, who are also named as defendants, leaked information about her whereabouts and were in on the alleged kidnap plot.
“They began by threatening to dismember her if she did not explain the location of her hidden money or admit to spying for the CIA or Mossad,” court papers allege, adding she lost 30 pounds during her confinement.
“They cursed me and said many vulgar things about the Kurds,” Saleem told The Post. Kurds are a minority in Iraq making up between 15 and 20 percent of the population.
“They want to make genocide against us,” she claimed, referring to ongoing struggles with the Shia Muslim majority.
“I was targeted for my ethnicity and the fact that I am a woman in a region where women are treated as second class citizens,” she said.
After her escape, she sought the protection of Iraq’s then-President, Fuad Masum, a fellow Kurd. Militants responded by firing rockets at the presidential palace, according to court documents.
When she returned to the US three weeks after her ordeal, she was met at the airport by FBI agents who spent nearly two weeks debriefing her and collecting evidence, who said they had intelligence al-Maliki was involved in her kidnapping, according to Saleem.
“They also left her with a stark warning: if she returned to Iraq, the forces lined up against her would use the Iraqi legal system against her to throw her in prison, seize her assets and pilfer her business,” court papers say.
Nevertheless she returned three years later to continue working on her construction project and was served with an arrest warrant based on what she claimed were trumped up charges relating to a business loan.
She managed to get the charges dropped but “defendants continue to manipulate the Iraqi judicial system against her” with the help of Zidan, the court papers allege.
A recent study conducted by the London School of Economics’ Middle East Center confirmed the judicial corruption in Iraq which it maintained “poses a risk to the rule of law” in the country and serves the interests of the Shia political elite.
“Following the fall of Saddam Hussein, the judiciary has become progressively insulated from criticism, with power concentrated within the Supreme Judicial Council,” the February report said.
“The consolidation has allowed the judiciary to expand its role beyond impartial justice administration, engaging more actively in political processes and increasing its susceptibility to political influence.”
Saleem’s case was brought under the federal Anti-Terrorism Act and the Torture Victim Protection Act, which allows victims of torture to bring civil lawsuits against individuals who have committed torture, acting under the authority of a foreign state.
If she prevails, she is hoping the Iraqi government will pay her $2 billion settlement.
“I have faith in the US justice system,” Saleem said, adding that her lawyers have also written a letter to President Trump, asking him to intervene in the case. “In the US there is rule of law and I believe that the perpetrators will be held accountable.”
Officials at the Iraqi Embassy in Washington DC did not return a request for comment.