THE sprawling complex of Abu Ghraib prison was at the heart of Saddam Hussein’s murderous regime, a scene of mass executions and torture for political prisoners and common criminals.

Now its watchtowers are manned by American troops and the inmates sweating in tent compounds inside its walls are Saddam’s own die-hard loyalists, The Times discovered on a rare visit yesterday.

The US Army thought long and hard about taking over the notorious jail 18 miles west of Baghdad, but faced with a growing number of high- security detainees and a lack of functioning prisons, it has decided to renovate the complex and reopen it. Behind high coils of razor wire, several hundred detainees live in sweltering tents lined up under the gaze of soldiers in watchtowers and military police patrolling the perimeter walls.

“What are we doing here? They just pulled us from our homes, we are normal people and we did nothing,” Baghdad residents in a crowd shouted at visiting reporters, who were forbidden from speaking to them. “Rescue us, what have we done?” According to their jailers, many of them have, in fact, fired rocket-propelled grenades (RPG) and Kalashnikov rifles at coalition forces.

The American forces here strongly reject any suggestion that the Iraqis still attacking them might be prisoners of war. “They are terrorists,” Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez, the coalition forces commander, said when asked about the status of captured fighters.

“Just because a civilian fired an RPG at us doesn’t make him a prisoner of war,” First Sergeant Daryl Keithley said.

The prisoners are labelled “security detainees” under the Geneva Convention and will be tried eventually by Iraqi judges in Iraqi courts, after questioning by US military intelligence.

Unlike the “enemy combatants” from the Afghan War being held by the United States at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Sergeant Keithley said that the prisoners had roughly the same living conditions as American soldiers serving in Iraq: cots to sleep on, rugs in their tents and rudimentary shower and toilet facilities. They eat the same US army rations.

The army has contracted local workers to renovate the cell blocks that once incarcerated those who had fallen foul of Saddam: the galleries stretch off for row after row and soon will be inhabited by captured guerrillas and high-risk prisoners, many of whom had been imprisoned in Abu Ghraib until Saddam released them in a sweeping amnesty at the start of the war in Iraq.

The decision last month to revive the prison camp caused such concern among Iraqis that the US Army was obliged to put up a sign at the gate saying: “America is a friend of all Iraqi people.” There is also a sign redirecting anyone seeking detained relatives to contact the Red Cross.

Another part of the complex is also being renovated: the execution block, where untold thousands of Iraqis were shot, hanged or electrocuted, often after years of brutal incarceration. Now it is being cleaned up to serve as a memorial to those who perished there, although the army has no idea when its doors might open to visitors.

The grim room where prisoners were hanged – sometimes in front of their families – is still intact, despite extensive looting, with the lever- operated trapdoors standing detached from the drop holes where countless inmates plunged to their deaths.

Witnesses who survived the camp have spoken of mass executions.

Saddam’s youngest son, Qusay, was said to have turned up to inspect the camp one day and found it overcrowded, with up to 20,000 prisoners crammed into cells designed to hold 4,000. He solved the problem swiftly and mercilessly by ordering 2,000 people to be executed.

In the death-row cells next to the concrete execution building, the condemned have scratched their names on the walls of the tiny cells that they were jammed into, which still reek of human excrement months later.

“Allah is great, the only certainty comes from him, and not from people,” one message reads.

Now inmates fret about the heat, boredom and insufficient washing facilities, according to a recent report by Amnesty International — and the fact that they are detained by what many see as an enemy army.

Angered by the conditions, some rioted in June: one prisoner was killed as American special forces stormed their compounds to restore order.

Now the most serious danger that they face is from fellow Iraqis implacably opposed to the occupation. Abu Ghraib, built in a crime-ridden suburb of Baghdad, is a regular target for mortar and grenade attacks.

“Automatic weapons-fire and daily explosions are part of the life here,” Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Grosskruger said, as an explosion sent up a cloud of dust a few hundred metres beyond the prison’s walls. Far from being worried by the random shooting, the prisoners cheer when their comrades’ fire comes close, he said.

Times Recommends

• Should Knox’s trial even have reached the courtroom?
• 'Was it real?' The US bailout nightmare
• Iranian opposition plays the long game