Iraq: The Unhappy Fate of Women Whose Fathers and Husbands Have Died

Here are two depressing stories of the desperate situations that some Iraqi widows and their daughters must deal with to put food on the table.

The shame of Iraq’s pariah widows

Michael Sergeant (BBC News)

… Accurate figures are hard to obtain, but even before the invasion in 2003, there were hundreds of thousands of widows in Iraq.

Many lost husbands in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. At the height of the violence of recent years, up to 100 women a day were becoming widows.

Almost everywhere you go in Baghdad, you can see them begging at traffic lights and outside mosques – dressed from head to toe in black.

The women are supposed to be given just over $1 (£0.70) a day from the government.

But a survey by the charity Oxfam has discovered that less than a quarter actually get the money …

and also:

Iraq’s Unspeakable Crime: Mothers Pimping Daughters

Rania Abouzeid (Time Magazine)

… [The] underworld is a place where nefarious female pimps hold sway, where impoverished mothers sell their teenage daughters into a sex market that believes females who reach the age of 20 are too old to fetch a good price. The youngest victims, some just 11 and 12, are sold for as much as $30,000, others for as little as $2,000. “The buying and selling of girls in Iraq, it’s like the trade in cattle,” Hinda says. “I’ve seen mothers haggle with agents over the price of their daughters….”