'Hung by my wrists and beaten': Israeli-Russian woman says Iraqi militants tortured her in captivity
An Israeli-Russian woman held captive for two and a half years by militants in Iraq has told the BBC how she invented
"confessions" to try to get her captors to stop torturing her.
Elizabeth Tsurkov, who was freed in September, says she suffered extreme abuse for 100 days, leaving her physically and
Warning: This article contains distressing content including descriptions of torture
"My health is not great," Ms Tsurkov says.
The interview she gave to BBC Newshour was conducted in central Israel, propped up on a bed. It is now almost three
months after her release from captivity in Iraq, where she was held for 903 days. The first four and a half months had
been particularly brutal: she was, she says, trussed and hung from the ceiling, whipped, sexually abused, electrocuted.
In March 2023, Ms Tsurkov, a 39-year-old doctoral student at Princeton University in the US, was living in Baghdad,
conducting fieldwork for her PhD in comparative politics. She agreed to meet a woman who described herself as a friend
of a friend. The woman never showed up. Ms Tsurkov started walking home. She says that a car pulled up behind her and
two men dragged her in, beating and sexually assaulting her. She was driven to the outskirts of the capital.
"During the first month, they starved me and interrogated me, but at the time they didn't know about my Israeli
citizenship. They're simply convinced that all foreigners are spies."
Ms Tsurkov had insisted that she was a Russian citizen. But then the kidnappers accessed her phone, and "because I'm not
a spy and don't have multiple encrypted devices, everything showed that I'm Israeli".
She says that was when the torture started: electrocutions, beatings, whippings, sexual abuse and what she calls Middle
Eastern "specialities". "Being hung from the ceiling with hands cuffed behind my back. Being hung with the hands above
And "a particular method that is used in Iraq. It's called 'the scorpion'. You get handcuffed with [your] shoulders
crossed behind the back. It often leads to dislocation of shoulders."
Ms Tsurkov believes she was held by members of Kataib Hezbollah, one of the most powerful Iran-backed militias in Iraq,
designated a terrorist organisation by the US and others. These militias are part of the paramilitary Popular
Mobilisation Forces and are widely seen in the country as wielding considerable behind-the-scenes power in government
In the brief periods between torture, she tried to strategise. "I had to learn all sorts of weird conspiracy theories.
They live in an alternative reality in which Israel and the United States and Saudi Arabia together created ISIS [the
Islamic State group], and the US spreads homosexuality through single sex cafes."
She created confessions about herself to try to avoid torture, based on spy plots and her captors' "quite insane
worldview", while not implicating any Iraqis. Many of her friends, she says, were activists whom the militants also
wanted to kidnap and torture.
But her strategy had one major downside. "They would torture me so I would give them these confessions that I would
invent, and then they simply got greedy. So, they would return, hang me by my wrists and start beating me with a stick
and using even harsher methods of torture and saying, 'I want something new.'"
Ms Tsurkov says she does not understand why, after 100 days of abuse, she was moved to another location. She was still
in solitary confinement with no outside light, but the torture stopped.
What she is certain about is how she came to be released. The US businessman Mark Savaya, who campaigned for Donald
Trump in the 2024 presidential election, was appointed US special envoy to Iraq this October.
According to Ms Tsurkov, one month before, he had travelled to Baghdad to speak to Prime Minister Mohammed Shia
al-Sudani. Among the messages he conveyed, she says, was that President Trump was extremely annoyed about her captivity,
and that if she were not freed within a week, the leadership of Kataib Hezbollah would be killed. Within days, she was
When he announced Ms Tsurkov's freedom from captivity on 9 September, Iraq's prime minister described it as "a
culmination of extensive efforts exerted by our security services over the course of many months". He also stressed
Iraq's commitment to law enforcement and state authority.
He made no mention of Kataib Hezbollah or any US threat. But two weeks later, a senior official in Kataib Hezbollah, Abu
Ali al-Askari, put out a statement saying that Sudani's government had sought Ms Tsurkov's release in order to prevent a
US strike on Iraq and to oblige the US to comply with its agreement to withdraw its forces from the country. He also
claimed that Ms Tsurkov had been released after "giving out all the information she had" under interrogation by the
The US State Department did not respond to a request for comment from the BBC.
Ms Tsurkov's long road to rehabilitation - mental and physical - is beginning in Israel. But she is determined to
complete her PhD at Princeton. Since her release, she has watched the parties associated with the Iran-backed militias
grow in strength in recent parliamentary elections in Iraq. More broadly, she says, it is ordinary Iraqis who lose out
from a "horribly corrupt system in an incredibly rich country", where the commanders of the militias "continue to
Ms Tsurkov, who has lived in Israel since her release, says she sees a country transformed in the aftermath of the
Hamas-led attacks on 7 October 2023 and Israel's protracted war in Gaza. "I'm undergoing therapy, and many of the kind
of symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder are collectively experienced by Israelis since October 7th. There's a
great sense of insecurity and desire to unleash the anger that exists within people."
Ms Tsurkov has been a long-standing critic of Israeli government policy towards Palestinians and within the region. She
has a wide circle of Palestinian, Lebanese and Iraqi friends. She's worked for the Israel NGO Gisha, which campaigns to
protect freedom of movement for Palestinians.
The events of the last two years have, she says, left her much more pessimistic about the possibility of peace. "October
7th was a literal massacre of the left, because many of the people who live in the kibbutzim, the communities along the
Gaza border, were peace activists. And it's a massacre of the left in the sense that the voices who support peace have
gotten much weaker and more demonised."
More immediately, she has her own recovery to concentrate on. She had, she says, previously worked with victims of
torture. "But nothing prepares you for the horror of undergoing it." She also reveals the toll of the false confessions.
"It kind of seeps through in some way; maybe like the situation of a battered wife who internalises to some extent the
view of the abuser of herself."
There is one key fact to cling to: that she got out. "For sure, I have more recovery ahead of me. But I think I was
lucky, in a very unlucky situation."