Israeli-Russian woman says Iraqi militants tortured her in captivity

A Russian-Israeli woman who was held by armed groups in Iraq for two-and-a-half years has told the BBC how she made up “confessions” to try to persuade her captors to stop torturing her.

Elizabeth Tsurkov, who was released in September, says she suffered severe abuse for 100 days, leaving her physically and mentally scarred.

Warning: This article contains graphic content including descriptions of torture

“My health is not good,” says Ms. Tsurkov.

Her interview with BBC Newshour was conducted in central Israel, while she was lying on a bed. It has now been nearly three months since she was released from captivity in Iraq, where she was held for 903 days. The first four-and-a-half months were particularly brutal: she says she was tied up, hung from the ceiling, flogged, sexually assaulted, and electrocuted.

In March 2023, Ms. Tsurkov, a 39-year-old doctoral student at Princeton University in the US, was living in Baghdad, doing fieldwork for her doctorate in comparative politics. I agreed to meet a woman who described herself as a friend of a friend. The woman never showed up. Mrs. Tsurkov began to return home. She says a car stopped behind her and two men pulled her in, beat her, and sexually assaulted her. It was moved to the outskirts of the capital.

“For the first month, they starved me and interrogated me, but at that time they did not know about my Israeli nationality. They are simply convinced that all foreigners are spies.”

Ms Tsurkov insisted she was a Russian citizen. But then the kidnappers gained access to her phone, and “because I’m not a spy and I don’t have multiple encrypted devices, everything shows that I’m Israeli.”

She says that’s when the torture began: electrocution, beatings, floggings, sexual assault, and what she calls Middle Eastern “specialties.” “To be hung from the ceiling with my hands tied behind my back. To be hung with my hands above my head.”

“A specific method used in Iraq is called “scorpion.” [your] Shoulders crossed behind the back. “It often leads to shoulder dislocation.”

Ms. Tsurkov believes she was detained by members of Kataib Hezbollah, one of the most powerful Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, which the United States and others designate as a terrorist organization. These militias are part of the paramilitary Popular Mobilization Forces, and are widely seen in the country as wielding significant behind-the-scenes power in government and trade.

In the short periods between torture, I tried to devise a strategy. “I had to learn all kinds of strange conspiracy theories. They live in an alternate reality in which Israel, the United States and Saudi Arabia together created ISIS.” [the Islamic State group]The United States spreads homosexuality through single-sex cafes.”

She made up confessions about herself in an attempt to avoid torture, based on spy plots and her captors’ “crazy worldview,” without implicating any Iraqis. She says many of her friends were activists who the militants also wanted to kidnap and torture.

But her strategy had a major downside. “They would torture me until I gave them these confessions that I would make up, and then they would just get greedy. So, they would come back and hang me by the wrist and start hitting me with a stick and using harsher torture methods and saying: I want something new.”

Ms. Tsurkov says she does not understand why she was transferred to another location after 100 days of abuse. She was still in solitary confinement without outside light, but the torture stopped.

What she is certain of is how she was released. American businessman Mark Savaya, who participated in Donald Trump’s election campaign in the 2024 presidential elections, was appointed as a special American envoy to Iraq this October.

According to Ms. Tsurkov, one month ago he traveled to Baghdad to speak with Prime Minister Muhammad Shia al-Sudani. She says among the messages he conveyed was that President Trump was deeply disturbed by her captivity, and that if she was not released within a week, the leadership of Kataib Hezbollah would be killed. Within days she was released.

When the Iraqi Prime Minister announced Ms. Tsurkov’s release from captivity on September 9, he described it as “the culmination of intensive efforts made by our security services over several months.” He also stressed Iraq’s commitment to law enforcement and state authority.

He did not mention Kataib Hezbollah or any American threat. But two weeks later, a senior Kataib Hezbollah official, Abu Ali al-Askari, issued a statement saying that Sudan’s government sought Ms. Tsurkov’s release in order to prevent a US strike on Iraq and force the United States to comply with its agreement to withdraw its forces from the country. He also claimed that Ms Tsurkov was released after “giving all the information she had” while being interrogated by the “entity” holding her.

The US State Department did not respond to a request for comment from the BBC.

Ms. Tsurkov’s long road to rehabilitation – psychological and physical – begins in Israel. But she is determined to complete her doctorate at Princeton. Since her release, she has witnessed the growing strength of parties linked to Iranian-backed militias in Iraq’s recent parliamentary elections. More broadly, she says, it is ordinary Iraqis who lose out from “a horribly corrupt system in an incredibly rich country,” where militia leaders continue to “operate above the law.”

Ms Tsurkov, who has been living in Israel since her release, says she sees a transformation in the country in the wake of the Hamas-led attacks on October 7, 2023 and Israel’s long war in Gaza. “I am undergoing treatment, and many of the symptoms of PTSD have been experienced by Israelis en masse since October 7. There is a great feeling of insecurity and the desire to unleash the anger that exists within people.”

Ms. Tsurkov has been a long-time critic of Israeli government policy toward the Palestinians and within the region. She has a wide circle of Palestinian, Lebanese and Iraqi friends. She worked for the Israeli NGO Gisha, which fights to protect freedom of movement for Palestinians.

She says that the events of the past two years have made her more pessimistic about the possibility of peace. “October 7 was a real massacre of the left, because many of the people living in the kibbutzim, and the communities along the Gaza border, were peace activists. It is a massacre of the left in the sense that the voices that support peace became much weaker and more demonized.”

Immediately, she had her own recovery to focus on. She says she has previously worked with torture victims. “But nothing prepares you for the horror of submitting to it.” It also reveals the toll of false confessions. “It kind of leaks out in a way; maybe like the situation of a battered wife who kind of internalizes her abuser’s point of view.”

There’s one key fact to cling to: it’s out. “I definitely have a lot of recovery ahead of me. But I think I was lucky, in a very unlucky situation.”