Nine-year-old girls raped, beaten and forced to ‘legally’ marry old men. Teenagers attacked by their own fathers and brothers in ‘honour’ killings before being thrown in secret  graves. This is the horrific truth of life in Iraq

As I write this, my two young granddaughters are playing on the floor of my small home.

Aged four and six, they tussle over their dolls, turning to me to ask who should get the one that is prettiest.

‘Be kind,’ I instruct them, with a smile. Along with their mother – my daughter – and her husband, my granddaughters live with me in my apartment, so I am used to their squabbles.

In recent days however, I have found it harder to enjoy their play.

Instead, I am sickened by the thought that I live in a country that plans to make it legal for someone to take my eldest grandchild as a wife in three years’ time – when she is just nine years old.

This terrible change took place last year, when Iraq’s parliament increased the authority of Islamic courts over all family matters, including marriage – the minimum age for which was previously set at 18 – divorce and inheritance.

Under the Jaafari school of Islamic law followed by many religious authorities in my country, this could mean nine-year-old girls being given away to men decades older.

I cannot help but weep. In recent years, it has felt like our world was going backwards, plummeting to one of the lowest points for women in our nation’s modern history.

In recent years, it has felt like our world was going backwards, plummeting to one of the lowest points for women in our nation’s modern history, the author writes

While outwardly we are more forward-looking than other Islamic nations – we have women MPs, doctors, powerful women’s groups and activists who have risked much by taking to the streets – behind the modern facade our rights are being slowly eroded.

Women have been raped and kidnapped, while domestic violence is a way of life for many.

Among them are some of my friends, their beatings meted out by husbands who know the wounds caused will not be seen under traditional dress – and that even if reported, will be dismissed, given that very few, if any, cases result in convictions or punishment.

Far worse, it is believed hundreds of Iraqi women each year are still being murdered on grounds of ‘honour’ for bringing shame on their families after refusing to enter a marriage, for taking lovers the family disapproves of, or to cover up cases of incest.

In many cases, the manner of their death is concealed by a verdict of ‘suicide’ from authorities all too eager to turn a blind eye to the depraved reality. Countless others are buried in secret graves.

Outside Batha, in the Dhi Qar province, in the south of the country, one graveyard, containing hundreds of unmarked graves holding the bodies of women who are the victims of honour killings is known as the ‘hills of sin’. It is just one of many around the country.

Only recently, I became aware of the shocking findings of an investigation supported by the Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism, which was released earlier this year. Their stories chill the blood. 

In rural communities, where tribal leaders still wield great power, they uncovered devastating stories of girls slaughtered for the crime of falling in love or being seen in public with a man who was not a relative.

The unmarked section of the Siwan cemetery in Sulaimaniyah, the Kurdistan region’s second city, where most of the headstones are left blank indicating the graves of victims of feminicide and honour crimes

One young girl told the story of her cousin, who lived in a farming village in southern Iraq, who was pitilessly beaten by her family when they learned she wanted to marry someone other than the cousin they had chosen for her.

Taking advantage of the fact that her grandmother had died and the family were in mourning, she managed to escape before the wedding could take place, married her lover and moved with him to another province.

Three years after she escaped, and now pregnant with her first child, she was delighted to receive a letter from her family telling her they had forgiven her and would welcome her home.

It was a trap.

Her three brothers were lying in wait for her on the outskirts of the village armed with knives. They stabbed her in every part of her body, including her pregnant stomach, before dumping her body.

I myself know of the case of a girl of just 16, beaten to death by her father and two brothers for ‘disrespecting Islamic teachings’ and bringing disgrace on the family for secretly meeting a man against their wishes.

They had found his messages on her telephone, and she had refused to stop seeing him – teenage stubbornness for which she paid with her life.

Another terrible story: a young Kurdish woman taken at gunpoint by her two brothers and a cousin to a remote area and partially buried in a hillside grave – only her head remaining clear of soil – and left to die after being seen leaving her job at a hotel with a man she insisted was just a friend.

She was saved because her brother-in-law, a lawyer, had overheard the men plotting the woman’s murder, and persuaded her father to reveal the burial location. When he discovered her 24 hours later – terrified hours she had spent unable to move believing she would die there – she told him that the last words she heard from her brothers was of her dishonour.

‘This is your punishment in this world, and you should expect worse in the next,’ they yelled as they disappeared into the darkness.

One young Kurdish woman taken at gunpoint by her two brothers and a cousin to a remote area and partially buried in a hillside grave – and left there to die

Faced with such stories, is it any wonder that women feel a degree of despair? I try and take comfort in the fact that we are not yet silenced or fully enslaved like our sisters in Afghanistan.

Yet it was not always like this – far from it.

At 51, I was born three years after the 1970 Iraqi constitution granted women equality and freedom in the eyes of the law, enshrining our right to vote, to run for political office, access education and own property.

Great advances had already been made from the mid-20th century onwards, there was a significant push to educate the nation’s girls, allowing many women to become professionals in fields such as medicine and the civil service.

My mother and grandmother did not choose that path, but enjoyed the freedom to wear what they wanted and to work should they choose.

The freedom was short-lived. The bloody war with Iran in the 1980s, with its millions of casualties on both sides; the Gulf War in the early 1990s, and the U.S-led invasion in 2003 followed by the long fight with Islamic State and the ongoing sectarian troubles – all of these had profound implications for the entire population, but especially women – who as ever were at the sharp end of the instability and economic hardship that any conflict brings.

It is one reason that I married at 18, shortly before the turn of the millennium: my father, a farmer, needed someone else to take responsibility for one of his five children.

The grandmother of two says she considers herself lucky. Her husband was kind, a fact which cannot be guaranteed 

I consider myself lucky. A family friend who lives in the marshland of the south cries when she recalls how her elder sister was married aged just 15, ‘given’ to a man nine years older, forced to abandon her education, she was pregnant by 16, and a mother of three aged 21.

My husband was kind, too, a fact that cannot be guaranteed in a society that still clings to patriarchy behind closed doors.

The fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 did not improve our lot. Sectarian violence tore our society apart, in the process sweeping away many of our rights. There was a surge in threats to women who did not wear the veil.

That aftermath also left me a widow with three young children. I had only been married for eight years when, one night, my husband did not return from his job near the port in our home city. Days later his body was found with two others dumped in wasteland, one of so many sectarian killings.

It has been a struggle ever since, in common with a million other widows – some say the figure is double that – in our 45million strong population. I am one of the lucky ones, scraping by with my work as a seamstress allows me and my family of four to survive.

Even so, life is tough, and it is a continual fight to get by, even with my son-in-law’s meagre wage as a factory worker, we still have empty stomachs for a day or two.

Nonetheless, I give thanks that my plight is not infinitely worse: each week at the open-air market where I sell my handmade goods I see dozens of women like me struggling to survive. Many have no roof over their head, living on the streets and reduced to begging. It is shameful.

Shameful too is the plight of those women who still have their husbands but live in fear. There is no shortage of them, among them a friend of mine who has been married for two decades and has been regularly abused by her husband throughout.

Many Iraqi women have turned to activism. Most recently, they did so to protest at the lawmakers trying to steal the childhoods of our little ones, and their defiance filled me with pride, the anonymous author writes

She has needed medical treatment for her injuries more than once, but no doctor has ever bothered to ask how she came about her wounds. If they did, they’d be unlikely to do anything about it, bar a few brave female doctors who are trying to highlight such abuse.

It is one reason my friend does not leave. She fears not only losing her children, but poverty, the stigma that befalls women who divorce and she knows that if she goes to the police she will not be believed. Instead, officers are likely to inform her husband of her complaints, and one of her beatings could prove her last.

How does she know this? Because the police turn a blind eye to far worse. Honour killings may be illegal in Iraq, but in reality the law makes a mockery of the word. Even on the few occasions such crimes reach court, culprits are met with derisory sentences.

Yet many brave Iraqi women have become activists, advocating for their rights and the rights of others and forming organisations to support victims of violence, promote education, and provide economic opportunities.

The younger generation, meanwhile, show an admirable determination not to settle for any erosion of their rights, frequently taking to the streets demanding justice, equality, and better living conditions. They did so to protest at the lawmakers trying to steal the childhoods of our little ones, and their defiance filled me with pride.

That battle has not been won, but it gives me hope.

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