Blast from the past:

Mariam, 16, relives the day her father in Baghdad sold her off as a domestic worker in one of the prosperous Gulf nations. Instead, she was forced into the sex trade.

“I was a virgin and didn’t understand what sex was. I was told that they [the traffickers] were going to get good money for my first night with an old local man who paid for my virginity. He was aggressive and hit me all the time,” Mariam, who refused to reveal her real name, told IRIN.

Thousands of Iraqi women are being taken advantage of by unscrupulous sex worker traffickers seeking to exploit young girls’ desperate socio-economic situation for profit, United Nations agencies have reported.

In Mariam’s case, she was taken to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and kept in a house with 20 young girls, all of them sex workers, she said.

Before she left Iraq, she and her three sisters were being cared for by her father. Their mother was killed during the US-led invasion of the country in 2003.

-IRIN News

Reported for the AP news by Omar Sinan:

DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) — The Iraqi women jump onto the stage at the al-Rawabi club, their long black hair swinging, their young faces caked with makeup. Iraqi pop music booms out as they sway and dance under strobe lights.

Nearby, a woman nicknamed At’outa meets her paying dates — men who hand over $90 a night for companionship and sex.

This club in northwest Damascus represents one of the most troubling aspects of the Iraqi refugee crisis — Iraqi women and girls who are turning to prostitution to survive in countries that have taken them in but won’t let them or their families work at most other jobs.

No reliable figures of Iraqi prostitutes exist, but an increase in the number of Iraqi women seen in recent months in clubs and on the streets of Damascus, Amman and other cities suggests the problem is growing as more Iraqis flee their country’s violence.

Most of the Iraqi women at the al-Rawabi club appeared to be in their late teens and early 20s although some were older. While some danced on stage, about a half-dozen others strolled around the tables, smiling at men and inviting offers to sit down for a drink.

Ayman al-Halaqi, a club manager here, said Iraqi dancers are cheaper to hire than Syrians. Back home, even dancing in a skimpy costume would be considered shameful. Iraqi women who go beyond that can earn 10 times more from a single encounter with a client than by working a full day as a housemaid.

Read the rest of the article here.

Sahar Al Haideri, a Mosul-based reporter who was murdered there last month, reported the following story recently featured in the Middle East Times:

MOSUL, Iraq — Asma’s family was facing dire financial problems when a man in his 60s came to her father with an offer that they could not refuse: he said that he would hire Asma for $200 a month to help take care of his wife, who was handicapped.

Asma’s mother is blind and her father is disabled, leaving them struggling to make ends meet. The man assured the couple that Asma could visit them, and that he would raise her with his daughters. The impoverished family took him up on the offer, but Asma, 17, had no idea what was in store for her.

“My work was not only in the kitchen; I had to have sex with [the] son of the man who hired me and his four or five friends,” she said in an interview after fleeing a life of sexual slavery. “I left my father’s house a virgin and now I am …”

She stopped speaking. Her father said nothing except, “I put my trust in God.”

The deteriorating security situation and absence of law and order has allowed sexual slavery to grow in Iraq, with traffickers able to sell victims without fear of punishment.

According to the US State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report, issued in June, Iraqi women and children are forced into prostitution and trafficked inside Iraq and abroad, to countries like Syria, Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, and Iran.

In the volatile northwestern city of Mosul, near the Syrian border, girls and young women from poor and illiterate families are particularly vulnerable to sexual exploitation. Many of those hired as domestic servants end up becoming sex slaves.

Khaled, 45, who readily admits to involvement in the sex trade, wears jeans and a yellow T-shirt with four or five rings on his fingers and bracelets around his wrist. This reporter witnessed him speaking to a client about whether he preferred a brown or white girl or woman as a sex slave.

“I know some families who are ready to have their daughters work to earn a living for them,” he said. “Some ask me if [their daughters] can only work in kitchens, while others try to close their eyes and pretend that they have no idea that their daughters are being used as prostitutes.”

Other women seek Khaled out on their own, but do not always know the full extent of his business.

Zaineb, 20, is a thin and beautiful woman with light-coloured hair. She felt financially responsible for her family because her father was arrested by the US military, her mother was ill, and she had younger sisters that needed support. Zaineb got a job through Khaled, but to her horror discovered that she had been forced into prostitution.

“I [have to] sleep with different men each night,” said Zaineb, who managed to contact IWPR. “[My boss] and his friends always take me to a farm, where they get drunk, and then have sex with me. I cry, asking for help from my father and mother, but how can they hear me?”

Victims of sexual slavery in Iraq have little support from the police or the courts. Iraqi law only criminalizes the sexual exploitation of children.

Many women are tricked into sex slavery in Iraq with the promise of a new life in the Gulf.

Khaled convinced 18-year-old Alia’s family that a man in the Gulf wanted to marry her, and paid for her passport and new clothes.

“Like any other bride, I was happy,” she said. “But I discovered after I traveled to the Gulf that the bridegroom was a nightclub manager who used many other Iraqi girls for prostitution. I managed to flee after 10 humiliating months.

“I was screaming when one of [the men] had sex with me; they considered me a slave that they had bought. I lost my dreams, hopes, and future.”

The state department report noted that the Iraqi government did not prosecute any trafficking cases this year, nor did it offer protection for victims or make efforts to prevent or document trafficking. It also said that efforts needed to be made to “curb the complicity of public officials in the trafficking of Iraqi women.”

The names of people mentioned in this story have been changed to protect their identity.

The New York Times reports the following story:

MARABA, Syria — Back home in Iraq, Umm Hiba’s daughter was a devout schoolgirl, modest in her dress and serious about her studies. Hiba, who is now 16, wore the hijab, or Islamic head scarf, and rose early each day to say the dawn prayer before classes.

But that was before militias began threatening their Baghdad neighborhood and Umm Hiba and her daughter fled to Syria last spring. There were no jobs, and Umm Hiba’s elderly father developed complications related to his diabetes.

Desperate, Umm Hiba followed the advice of an Iraqi acquaintance and took her daughter to work at a nightclub along a highway known for prostitution. “We Iraqis used to be a proud people,” she said over the frantic blare of the club’s speakers. She pointed out her daughter, dancing among about two dozen other girls on the stage, wearing a pink silk dress with spaghetti straps, her frail shoulders bathed in colored light.

As Umm Hiba watched, a middle-aged man climbed onto the platform and began to dance jerkily, arms flailing, among the girls.

“During the war we lost everything,” she said. “We even lost our honor.” She insisted on being identified by only part of her name — Umm Hiba means mother of Hiba.

For anyone living in Damascus these days, the fact that some Iraqi refugees are selling sex or working in sex clubs is difficult to ignore.

Even in central Damascus, men freely talk of being approached by pimps trawling for customers outside juice shops and shawarma sandwich stalls, and of women walking up to passing men, an act unthinkable in Arab culture, and asking in Iraqi-accented Arabic if the men would like to “have a cup of tea.”

By day the road that leads from Damascus to the historic convent at Saidnaya is often choked with Christian and Muslim pilgrims hoping for one of the miracles attributed to a portrait of the Virgin Mary at the convent. But as any Damascene taxi driver can tell you, the Maraba section of this fabled pilgrim road is fast becoming better known for its brisk trade in Iraqi prostitutes.

Many of these women and girls, including some barely in their teens, are recent refugees. Some are tricked or forced into prostitution, but most say they have no other means of supporting their families. As a group they represent one of the most visible symptoms of an Iraqi refugee crisis that has exploded in Syria in recent months.

According to the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, about 1.2 million Iraqi refugees now live in Syria; the Syrian government puts the figure even higher.

Given the deteriorating economic situation of those refugees, a United Nations report found last year, many girls and women in “severe need” turn to prostitution, in secret or even with the knowledge or involvement of family members. In many cases, the report added, “the head of the family brings clients to the house.”

[Read the rest of the article.]

Click here for another story involving Iraqi women and sexual slavery.

Amal from the Arab Woman Progressive Voice writes:

Rape and war go hand in hand. That’s the lesson of history. That’s the lesson of Iraq. Iraqi women are being raped and for the most part are silent about it. The rapists, unfortunately, will get away.

When Sabreen al Janabi came forward with accusations of rape, the issue became a sectrarian one. Those who did not believe her, and in fact just issued a warrant for her arrest on the grounds that she’s has more than one husband, tarnished her reputation. Her supporters saw in her rape a violatioin of their sunni honor and slaughtered 22 men who had nothing to do with the rape in her name. Both parties were acting as if this is the first rape that ever happened. A woman’s rape is outrageous only if it fits in one group or another’s politcal agenda.

But Iraqi women are being raped. We will never know how many and their rapists, in the majority of cases, will never be punished. They will live silently with the pain and stigma.