BAGHDAD, 12 October 2003 — Amina is putting her beauty salon up for sale. She has recovered from the episode last June when armed men burst in and robbed her clients of cash and jewelry, and she has learned to live with the gunfights that erupt with regularity at the coffee shop next door.
But within the space of a month, she says her teenage apprentice narrowly escaped abduction, a customer was held at gunpoint in another kidnapping attempt, and one of her regulars was dragged away by the hair and gang raped. Such is the pace of events in postwar Baghdad, where the US occupation has ushered in an explosive rise in crime which has wreaked havoc on once genteel areas, and driven women indoors.
Amid the ordinary lawlessness of a city of 5 million with a barely functioning police force, there are particular horrors for women. The last few months have seen the emergence of organized crime, trafficking in drugs and stolen cars — and, the evidence suggests, in women as well.
At the same time, Baghdad remains a city consumed by thoughts of revenge, against Baathists at first and now increasingly against rival gangs. Many scores are settled by kidnapping and rape. The breakdown of law and order began with the departure of Saddam Hussein’s regime, and with it the brutal system of control that had made Baghdad a relatively safe city for its size.
In Amina’s neighborhood, the previously respectable coffee shop next door expanded and hired four prostitutes to sit in the back. The gangs soon started coming round, sometimes with their friends in the police, and Amina’s customers left. “No one is going to come here any more,” she says. “There is no security, no safety. All my customers come to talk to me and ask me to move.”
Last week she reached breaking point. Armed thugs from a gang involved in prostitution tried to kidnap the apprentice on her first day at work, and beat up Amina’s husband and two other men who managed to save the girl.
A day later, on Sept. 29, Nada, one of Amina’s regulars, was not so lucky. Four armed men stormed into the coffee shop where she works, and dragged her by the hair to a waiting car.
Nada says they stopped the car once, to grab another woman wearing a head scarf. They punched her in the face, and shoved her in the car. They drove the women to the riverside north of Baghdad and raped them.
Nada believes her attackers wanted to punish her because she intervened to save a woman friend from a gang. Other women have been raped to avenge wrongs committed by men of the same clan, or singled out for their own associations with the regime. Some have been abducted and sold into prostitution, in a traffic where the price of a woman is about £60, according to the police. Still others were punished for offenses against Iraq’s code of behavior for women.
But Nada adds: “Do you think these gangs only kidnap girls like me? No, it’s any girl in the street. It’s not because of revenge, or because I do the work I do. It’s because they can do anything they want.”
For Asma, an engineer in her twenties, the attack was utterly random. She was abducted on May 18 from a crowded street in a suburb of Baghdad where she was shopping with her mother, younger sister, and an adult male cousin.
A pickup truck was parked on the curb, and six men were investigating car trouble. “Suddenly something flashed before my eyes, and we were surrounded. They opened fire all around us,” her mother says.
Asma was bundled inside, where two men pushed her head to her knees, and drove for several hours to a farmhouse on the edge of Baghdad, where she was repeatedly raped. It is unclear why she was targeted. The next day she was dropped off near her parents’ home. She has barely spoken since, and sits at home playing cards with her mother.
But at least she is alive. In the emergency room of Baghdad’s Al-Kindi hospital, a forlorn notice begs for information about a schoolgirl who disappeared from her home in May. Another seeks news of a woman of 33 who disappeared from her home in central Baghdad in July.
Fears of a similar fate have driven Baghdad’s female population indoors. When schools reopened on Oct. 4, classrooms were half empty, with girls kept home by parents forced to choose between education and safety.
Under US occupation, working women have re-ordered their lives, wearing hijab for the first time, or traveling with male relatives. Some barely venture out at all.
“There are criminals everywhere,” says one, Wesen Emmanuel. “They terrorize us, and there is sexual harassment.” In the six months since the war, she has been out with her friends only once. A dentist, she has given up on traveling by public bus, and has hired a driver to take her to her clinic some 20 miles from her home.
“I am scared all the time, and I am giving the driver all of my salary,” she says.
Another, Rafel Daniel, says she has stopped driving her own car, and asks her parents to chauffeur her on her errands. “I’m under house arrest,” she says.
All of the women recount stories of abduction — a great horror in a society like Iraq’s, where a family’s reputation is measured by the perceived virtue of its women. A woman suspected of transgressing social codes suffers extreme consequences for bringing shame on her family. Such codes also apply if she has been raped. She may even be murdered by her family to wipe out the stain on their reputation.
“We know of a lot of cases against women,” says Nidal Husseini, a nurse at Baghdad’s forensic institute. “When a girl is kidnapped and raped and returned to her family, of course the family will take her to a special doctor. The majority of doctors — without a test — will tell her family she is not a virgin, so the family will kill the girl because of the shame. Of course, they will bring the body to us.”
The institute investigated 50 suspicious deaths of women last month, victims of rape as well as “honor killings”, a fact which belies police claims that some measure of safety has been restored.
The authorities are reluctant to acknowledge a problem. The police force, widely viewed as incompetent and corrupt, is overwhelmed, and other officials show little inclination to sympathy.
At the forensic institute itself, where women are examined if they file a complaint, Abdul Razak Al-Obeidi, the deputy director, says: “This is a classical story. All women speak this story. They do not tell the truth.”
At his desk, Yasser Al-Yassery, who is in studying to be a forensic anthropologist, says: “Maybe it is self-inflicted. A woman causes herself trauma and says, ‘Someone raped me.’ In our work we don’t believe any story, because some women lie.”
But Heydar Jaffer Al-Taie knows a different story. Since last May, he has been making the rounds of the morgues every week, looking for his younger sister, Beda, 17.
“I know what kind of sister I had,” he says. “We have a good reputation.”
A serious-looking girl with large green eyes, she disappeared on her way to school. Taie and his brothers have traveled to hospitals across the country, handed out hundreds of leaflets, and offered to pay criminals to bring her back, but there has been no trace of Beda. “It’s as if everyone was blind that day. No one saw anything. I can’t find a single witness. I think they are afraid to talk. This has destroyed us.”
