An Australian hostage negotiator has shared her story of post-traumatic stress to encourage rural doctors to use their life experiences to better serve their communities.

In a keynote address to a rural doctors’ conference, Rabia Siddique, an Australian human rights lawyer, described how she had led hostage negotiations to free British soldiers in Iraq and had stared down torturers armed with AK-47s.

Ms Siddique, who worked for the British military during the Iraq war, was choppered in to the al-Jamiat prison in Basra to secure the release of the two men in September 2005.

When riots broke out, Ms Siddique was thrown in a cell with five male colleagues, where she was tortured and degraded for almost nine hours before the group was rescued in a British-American operation.