Israeli-Russian woman says Iraqi militants tortured her in captivity

An Israeli-Russian woman held captive by militants in Iraq for two-and-a-half years has told the BBC how she invented the “confession” to try to get her captors to stop torturing her.

Elizabeth Tsurkov, who was released in September, said she suffered extreme abuse for 100 days and was traumatized both physically and mentally.

WARNING: This article contains distressing content, including descriptions of torture

“My health is not very good,” Ms. Tsurkov said.

She spoke to the BBC Newshour from a bed in central Israel. She had been imprisoned in Iraq for 903 days, and it has now been nearly three months since her release. The first four and a half months were particularly brutal: She said she was tied and hung from the ceiling, whipped, sexually abused and electrocuted.

In March 2023, Ms. Chulkov, a 39-year-old doctoral student at Princeton University in the United States, lived in Baghdad to conduct fieldwork for her PhD in comparative politics. She agreed to meet with a woman who claimed to be a friend of a friend. The woman never showed up. Ms. Chukov began walking home. She said a car pulled up behind her and two men dragged her inside and beat and sexually assaulted her. She was driven to the outskirts of the capital.

“For the first month, they starved me and interrogated me, but they didn’t know my Israeli citizenship at the time. They just believed that all foreigners were spies.”

Ms. Zhurkov insists she is a Russian citizen. But then the kidnappers stole her phone, “because I’m not a spy and I don’t have multiple encryption devices, everything shows that I’m Israeli.”

That’s when she said the torture began: electrocution, beatings, whippings, sexual abuse and what she described as “characteristics” of the Middle East. “The hands were handcuffed behind the back and hung from the ceiling. The hands were hung above the head.”

“A particular method used in Iraq. It’s called the ‘Scorpion.’ You’re handcuffed with your shoulders crossed behind your back. This often results in a dislocated shoulder.”

Ms. Chulkov believes she is being held captive by members of Kataeb Hezbollah, one of the most powerful Iran-backed militias in Iraq and designated a terrorist organization by the United States and other countries. The militias are part of the paramilitary Popular Mobilization Forces, widely seen in the country as wielding considerable behind-the-scenes power in government and business.

In the brief moments between tortures, she tried to strategize. “I had to learn all kinds of weird conspiracy theories. They lived in an alternate reality where Israel, the United States and Saudi Arabia co-created ISIS (Islamic State) and the United States spread homosexuality through single-sex cafes.”

She tried to avoid torture but did not implicate any Iraqis by making her confession based on espionage plots and the “rather crazy world view” of her captors. She said many of her friends were activists and that militants wanted to kidnap and torture them.

But her strategy had a major drawback. “They would torture me, so I would give them these confessions that I invented, and then they would get greedy. So, they would come back, hang me by the wrists, start beating me with a stick, use harsher torture methods, and say, ‘I want something new.'”

Ms Tsurkov said she did not understand why she was moved to another location after 100 days of abuse. Although she was still held in solitary confinement, without any outside light, the torture had stopped.

What she is sure of is how she was released. American businessman Mark Savaya, who campaigned for Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election, was appointed as the US special envoy to Iraq in October.

According to Ms. Chulkov, he traveled to Baghdad a month ago to speak with Prime Minister Mohammad Shia al-Sudani. She said one of his messages was that President Trump was so angry about her imprisonment 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. Chulkov’s release on September 9, he described it as “the result of extensive efforts by our security services over several months.” He also emphasized Iraq’s commitment to law enforcement and state authority.

He did not mention Kataib Hezbollah or any U.S. threat. But two weeks later, a senior Kataeb Hezbollah official, Abu Ali Askari, issued a statement saying the Sudanese government sought Ms. Tsurkov’s release to prevent a U.S. attack on Iraq and force the U.S. to comply with an agreement to withdraw its troops from the country. He also claimed that Ms Tsurkov was released after “providing all the information in her possession” following interrogation by the “entity” who detained her.

The US State Department did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment.

Ms. Zhurkov’s long road to mental and physical recovery is beginning in Israel. But she was determined to complete her PhD at Princeton University. Since her release, she has watched political parties linked to Iran-backed militia groups grow in Iraq’s recent parliamentary elections. More broadly, she said, ordinary Iraqis were suffering because of “a horrifically corrupt system in an extremely wealthy country” where militia commanders “continue to be above the law”.

Ms Tsurkov, who has lived in Israel since her release, said she had seen the country change after the Hamas-led attack on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s protracted war in Gaza. “I am receiving treatment, and since October 7, Israelis have collectively experienced many symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. There is a strong sense of insecurity and a desire to release the anger that exists within people.”

Ms. Chulkov has long been critical of the Israeli government’s policies toward the Palestinians and the region. She had a wide range of Palestinian, Lebanese and Iraqi friends. She worked for Gisha, an Israeli NGO that works to protect Palestinians’ freedom of movement.

She said the events of the past two years had made her even more pessimistic about the possibility of peace. “October 7th was a veritable massacre of the left, because many of the people who live on kibbutzim, in communities along the Gaza border, are peace activists. In a sense, it was a massacre of the left, because the voices for peace became weaker and more demonized.”

More importantly, she needs to focus on her own recovery. She said she had worked with torture victims before. “But nothing can prepare you for the horror of it.” She also revealed the toll false confessions take. “It seeps in in some way; maybe like in the case of an abused wife, she internalizes her abuser’s perspective to some extent.”

There’s one key fact to remember: She’s out. “Of course I still have more time to recover. But I think I’m very lucky in a very unfortunate situation.”