It has become a momento mori, a kind of living sculpture in which angry and righteous Kurds have ransacked and gutted the building of everything down to the window frames and electric circuitry. The building is riddled with bullet pock-marks and the inside is blackened with fire and the remaining soot.

Doves now roost in the ground floor and artists have made plaster casts of their missing relatives placed in abject poses in the prison block: one staring up towards a fist sized window in his cell and another handcuffed to the stair rail.

In the main building there are quotes from the Koran, politic motifs and drawings painted or scratched into the plaster. There is a recurring motif of an eagle clutching a snake. Some are just shapes. (...)

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