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Abducted, beaten and sold into prostitution: two women's story from an Iraq in
turmoil
By Victoria Firmo-Fontan
July 25, 2004
When the gunmen came to the gate of their Baghdad home, the lives of the
sisters-in-law Huda, 16, and Sajeeda, 24 - the names they wish to be known by -
were about to change for ever. It was 17 September 2003. "We were cleaning the
front porch when five armed men came in, seized us and put a cloth over our
mouths," recalls Huda.
After losing consciousness, she remembers waking up in the house of Um Ahmed, a
female pimp, in the Saidiye district of Baghdad. "At first, I thought it was a
nightmare, then I realised I was on a bed that was not mine, my sister-in-law
Sajeeda was with me, and we were alone."
Sajeeda had been married only five weeks earlier.
Then came the beatings and the journeys between different houses and apartments
in the city, orchestrated by Um Ahmed and her husband. Huda and Sajeeda were
hidden in different locations across Baghdad, without food or water. "We tried
to escape many times," Sajeeda says. "But they hit us and threatened to kill
us. There was nothing we could do."
Meanwhile Huda's mother, Aisha, was searching for them. She went to her local
police station, to the Baghdad police anti-kidnapping unit, all to no avail.
Ten days later, Um Ahmed sold the girls to an Egyptian man called Mohammed
Hassan Khalil. "Because I was not married, I was sold for $6,000, and Sajeeda
for $3,000," says Huda. "My hymen had a price - this is when we realised that
we were going to have to do bad things with men. We were terrified."
The women's new "owner" drove them, with another Iraqi woman, to Syria. All
were given new names and passports to cross the border. With no American
soldier in sight, Huda and Sajeeda - renamed Haura abdel-Hamid and Rent Laith
for the occasion - left Iraq. They arrived at Damascus airport to fly to Yemen.
"When we passed through customs to take a flight to Yemen, we told a Syrian
official that we did not want to fly, that we had been abducted," says Huda.
Khalil was beaten and taken for questioning, to the relief of the three women.
"We thought we were going to go home, but then he was released. He beat Sajeeda
so much that evening that she could not walk any more, she was in so much
pain," recalls Huda. "He left us in a flat in the city centre, and went to see
a Syrian customs official that he knew he could bribe. We had to wait a week
for Sajeeda to get better, then we flew to Yemen."
When the women arrived at Damascus airport, the corrupt official was present,
and accepted Khalil's claim that the three were willingly travelling with him.
Khalil's version of events has been accepted by Colonel Faisal, head of the
Baghdad anti-kidnapping unit. In an interview given in March, Col Faisal
dismissed the girls' ordeal by saying that "those girls eloped with two young
men who offered to marry them". He added that "there is no widespread abduction
wave in Baghdad".
Khalil's wife, Um Issam, an Iraqi, met the women at the airport in Sana'a. She
took them to the el-Diafe Hotel in Aden. There, Huda looked after her
sister-in-law's beating injuries and both were assigned cleaning tasks in the
hotel until Sajeeda was able to do other work. "One day, Um Issam came to my
room. She said that she had paid a good price for us, and that is was time to
do real work," Sajeeda says. It meant what the other 180 Iraqi women and girls
were doing in the hotel, selling sex. Huda says: "All those Iraqi women and
girls, the youngest of whom was only 11 years old, were forced to have sex with
men from Yemen, America, and the Gulf states. They worked day and night, for no
payment, and when they refused, they were locked up in a toilet for 10 days,
forced to drink water from the toilet bowl to survive."
The women challenged Um Issam's orders. They were beaten so badly that Sajeeda
had to have hospital treatment. After this episode, unable to do "other" work,
both girls were permanently assigned cleaning duties in the hotel.
Tips from customers allowed the women to save up money to call their mother,
Aisha, in Iraq on a neighbour's satellite phone. "They were begging for me to
save their lives," Aisha says. "I told her that I would save them, no matter
what."
After receiving no assistance from the Baghdad anti-kidnapping unit, Aisha
turned to the Americans for help. She found a sympathetic ear in the person of
Sergeant First Class Troy EStewart at the headquarters of the 1st Armoured
Division Artillery in Baghdad. He could not do much, but wrote to the Yemeni
embassy urging it to facilitate Aisha's travel to Yemen. She recalls that Sgt
Stewart was so moved by her story that he took her picture to show his wife and
daughters in the US.
"When I collapsed in despair one day, he dispatched a car to drive me home, he
was always so kind to me," she says.
Week after week, Aisha went to the Yemeni embassy and to members of the Iraqi
Interim Governing Council until a deal was finally negotiated with the Yemeni
government for the release of all the women detained in the el-Diafe Hotel. The
scandal was embarrassing the Yemeni government.
"One day in early April, they raided the hotel and put us all in a bus to
Sana'a," Huda says. "When we arrived at the airport, the police said that the
women who could afford a plane ticket could go back to Iraq, and that the
others would have to marry and stay in Yemen." These 180 women had never been
paid, had been abducted from their homes and trafficked out of Iraq with fake
passports. None had the money or any identification to fly out of Sana'a that
day, nor any other day.
Huda and Sajeeda rang the Iraqi "madame" in Yemen, Um Issam, and begged for
help. "Some women were married off by Um Issam, for a large sum of money, under
the promise that they would get back to Iraq at a later date, but we decided to
get back to Iraq, and promised to work for Um Issam there," says Huda.
"Mohammed sent us passports, and two days later we came back to Baghdad through
Amman." When they arrived in Baghdad, the girls were scared to go home. "Um
Issam told us that we had tarnished our family honour, that our families would
kill us," Sajeeda says. "We then realised that we would have to work as
prostitutes, and we would have rather died. So we escaped and came back home."
The two young women talked to The Independent at Huda's home in Mahmoudiya,
south of Baghdad. Huda was welcomed with open arms by her parents. Sajeeda,
however, was in hiding from her family after her own brother vowed to kill her
if she refused to divorce her husband. In her brother's mind, she had cast
shame on to her family, and had to be kept under lock and key for the rest of
her life. When asked if the US-led occupation was to blame for their ordeal,
Huda, Sajeeda and Aisha all answer that organised crime existed long before the
arrival of the US in their country. Aisha explains: "I wanted to meet US
soldiers again to ask for help but the Iraqis refused that; no one but the
Americans had helped me."
Mohammed Hassan Khalil, who took the girls to Yemen, was arrested in Baghdad in
April but released without charges. Um Ahmed and her husband fled to Jordan,
and Um Issam is still in Yemen, her business flourishing. As Aisha puts it:
"The criminals who took my daughters are Saddam's heritage." So is the New Iraq
legal system, it seems.
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7-19-2004
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