Khan Bani Saad Prison

This past Sunday I went out to Khan Bani Saad prison. This place is rather infamous in Diyala for being the $40 million dollar boondoggle which resulted in a half built prison facility when the work stopped in 2007. Insurgents continued to attack the workers and hijack the construction equipment, until it made no sense for them to continue with the construction. I thought I should take a look at the facility to see if there was any chance of salvaging something from this giant money pit.

The facility is huge. There is a large perimeter wall with 24 guard towers and razor wire. The guard towers were envisioned as sleeping quarters for two guards, each guard tower at one time contained an Iraqi toilet (which is essentially a porcelain hole in the ground) and a shower. I say "at one time" because long ago the scavengers took away anything that could be resold or used. The guard towers actually turned out to be the most salvageable of all of the structures on the prison complex.

The buildings which had just been constructed not that long ago were crumbling. There were signs of shoddy workmanship everywhere. $40 million worth of buildings and they were all going to have to be razed because of how much they were crumbling. It was pretty unbelievable. There were a few metal buildings which were in good shape and could be used in the future, but overall the prison was pretty much worthless.

I had long been told that there were Iraqi Police and/or Iraqi Army personnel living at the facility to keep squatters from the place. Upon arriving at the prison it was like a ghost town, but there were signs everywhere that people had recently been there. There are approximately 15 abandoned buildings on the site, so we were all expecting someone to pop out at any moment. There was also a herd of sheep, a donkey and a few cows meandering across the prison grounds. No one would leave their livestock alone around here, so once again we all thought for sure we would be encountering some locals very soon. Fortunately, we never crossed paths with anyone during our visit. Rest assured I was ready to medieval on some insurgent ass, but the opportunity never arose (just kidding, although I was prepared to curl into the fetal position behind a pile of rubble trying not to soil myself).