- MAHMOUDIYA, Iraq -- 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.
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- 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."
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- Sajeeda had been married only five weeks earlier.
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- 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."
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- 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.
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- 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."
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- 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.
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- "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."
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- 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.
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- 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".
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- 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."
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- 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.
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- 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."
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- 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.
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- "When I collapsed in despair one day, he dispatched
a car to drive me home, he was always so kind to me," she says.
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- 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.
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- "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.
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- 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."
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- 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."
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- 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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- © 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=544122
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