Abu Ghraib prison
former prison in Abu Ghraib, Iraq
Abu Ghraib prison (Arabic: سجن أبو غريب, romanized: Sijn Abū Ghurayb) was a prison complex in Abu Ghraib, Iraq, located 32 kilometers (20 mi) west of Baghdad. It became internationally known as a place where Saddam Hussein's government tortured and executed dissidents, and later as the site of the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse scandal where the United States military's torture of Iraqi detainees was revealed in a series of photographs published in worldwide news media.
Abu Ghraib gained international attention in 2003 following the U.S. invasion of Iraq, when the torture and abuse of detainees committed by guards in part of the complex operated by Coalition forces was exposed.
Under Saddam's Ba'ath government, it was known as Abu Ghraib Prison and had a reputation as a place of torture and some of the worst cases of torture in the modern world. It was sometimes referred to in the Western media as "Saddam's Torture Central". The prison was renamed after United States forces expelled the former Iraqi government, which had called it the Baghdad Central Confinement Facility (BCCF) or Baghdad Central Correctional Facility. In May of 2004, Camp Avalanche, a tent camp on the grounds of Abu Ghraib for security detainees, changed its name to Camp Redemption at the request of a governing council member.
In 2006, the United States transferred complete control of Abu Ghraib to the federal government of Iraq, and was reopened in 2009 as Baghdad Central Prison (Arabic: سجن بغداد المركزي, romanized: Sijn Baġdād al-Markizī). However, due to security concerns during the War in Iraq, it closed in 2014. Since all of the 2,400 inmates were transferred to other high-security prisons, the prison complex is currently vacant, and Saddam-era mass graves have been uncovered at the site.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q334740. VIAF identifies the subject as 148880782. The Library of Congress control number is no2004074639. Authority coordinates are 33.292, 44.065. 1 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2003, 2004, 2006 and 2009.
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This entry incorporates text from “Abu Ghraib prison” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.