'Hung by my wrists and beaten': Israeli-Russian woman says Iraqi militants tortured her in captivity

In March 2023, Ms Tsurkov, a 39-year-old doctoral student at Princeton University in the US, was living in Baghdad, conducting fieldwork for her PhD in comparative politics. She agreed to meet a woman who described herself as a friend of a friend. The woman never showed up. Ms Tsurkov started walking home. She says that a car pulled up behind her and two men dragged her in, beating and sexually assaulting her. She was driven to the outskirts of the capital.

"During the first month, they starved me and interrogated me, but at the time they didn't know about my Israeli citizenship. They're simply convinced that all foreigners are spies."

Ms Tsurkov had insisted that she was a Russian citizen. But then the kidnappers accessed her phone, and "because I'm not a spy and don't have multiple encrypted devices, everything showed that I'm Israeli".

She says that was when the torture started: electrocutions, beatings, whippings, sexual abuse and what she calls Middle Eastern "specialities". "Being hung from the ceiling with hands cuffed behind my back. Being hung with the hands above my head."

And "a particular method that is used in Iraq. It's called 'the scorpion'. You get handcuffed with [your] shoulders crossed behind the back. It often leads to dislocation of shoulders."

Ms Tsurkov believes she was held by members of Kataib Hezbollah, one of the most powerful Iran-backed militias in Iraq, designated a terrorist organisation by the US and others. These militias are part of the paramilitary Popular Mobilisation Forces and are widely seen in the country as wielding considerable behind-the-scenes power in government and in commerce.

In the brief periods between torture, she tried to strategise. "I had to learn all sorts of weird conspiracy theories. They live in an alternative reality in which Israel and the United States and Saudi Arabia together created ISIS [the Islamic State group], and the US spreads homosexuality through single sex cafes."

She created confessions about herself to try to avoid torture, based on spy plots and her captors' "quite insane worldview", while not implicating any Iraqis. Many of her friends, she says, were activists whom the militants also wanted to kidnap and torture.

But her strategy had one major downside. "They would torture me so I would give them these confessions that I would invent, and then they simply got greedy. So, they would return, hang me by my wrists and start beating me with a stick and using even harsher methods of torture and saying, 'I want something new.'"

Ms Tsurkov says she does not understand why, after 100 days of abuse, she was moved to another location. She was still in solitary confinement with no outside light, but the torture stopped.

What she is certain about is how she came to be released. The US businessman Mark Savaya, who campaigned for Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election, was appointed US special envoy to Iraq this October.

According to Ms Tsurkov, one month before, he had travelled to Baghdad to speak to Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani. Among the messages he conveyed, she says, was that President Trump was extremely annoyed about her captivity, and that if she were not freed within a week, the leadership of Kataib Hezbollah would be killed. Within days, she was released.

Ms Tsurkov's long road to rehabilitation - mental and physical - is beginning in Israel. But she is determined to complete her PhD at Princeton. Since her release, she has watched the parties associated with the Iran-backed militias grow in strength in recent parliamentary elections in Iraq. More broadly, she says, it is ordinary Iraqis who lose out from a "horribly corrupt system in an incredibly rich country", where the commanders of the militias "continue to operate above the law".

Ms Tsurkov, who has lived in Israel since her release, says she sees a country transformed in the aftermath of the Hamas-led attacks on 7 October 2023 and Israel's protracted war in Gaza. "I'm undergoing therapy, and many of the kind of symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder are collectively experienced by Israelis since October 7th. There's a great sense of insecurity and desire to unleash the anger that exists within people."

Ms Tsurkov has been a long-standing critic of Israeli government policy towards Palestinians and within the region. She has a wide circle of Palestinian, Lebanese and Iraqi friends. She's worked for the Israel NGO Gisha, which campaigns to protect freedom of movement for Palestinians.

The events of the last two years have, she says, left her much more pessimistic about the possibility of peace. "October 7th was a literal massacre of the left, because many of the people who live in the kibbutzim, the communities along the Gaza border, were peace activists. And it's a massacre of the left in the sense that the voices who support peace have gotten much weaker and more demonised."

More immediately, she has her own recovery to concentrate on. She had, she says, previously worked with victims of torture. "But nothing prepares you for the horror of undergoing it." She also reveals the toll of the false confessions. "It kind of seeps through in some way; maybe like the situation of a battered wife who internalises to some extent the view of the abuser of herself."

There is one key fact to cling to: that she got out. "For sure, I have more recovery ahead of me. But I think I was lucky, in a very unlucky situation."