Camp Bucca: Iraq's Guantánamo Bay

Special thanks to the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, which provided a grant to assist David Enders's work.

DAVID ENDERS
Relatives of prisoners outside Camp Bucca, Iraq, summer 2008

It may seem hard to imagine a place where people incarcerated by the US military have fewer rights than they do in Guantánamo Bay.

Welcome to Iraq.

It is just after 4 am, and hundreds of Iraqis are lining up to visit their relatives outside Camp Bucca, which in August held about 18,000 detainees. Near the Kuwaiti border, Bucca shimmers in the predawn of the southern Iraqi desert, a beacon of light in a country where electricity is on for no more than twelve hours a day. It is the US military's largest detention center in Iraq. The total number of those officially in US custody in Iraq has fluctuated between a low of 7,200 and more than 26,000 since 2005.

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