Interview with Houzan Mahmoud: Iraq’s desperate economic and security situation is leading to the trafficking of hundreds of Iraqi women into prostitution and sexual slavery.  Rising numbers of Iraqi women are being sold into sexual slavery every year because of the waning economy and dire security situation. Continue reading

Ravaged by rights groups and upbraided by the U.S. for failing to take measures against human trafficking, the Iraqi government has been quietly working on a draft law to tackle the scourge. Baghdad was prodded into action late last year, after the release of the U.S. State Department’s “Trafficking in Persons Report,” according to Human Rights Minister Wijdan Mikhail Salim. “Let’s say it was a tough report about the situation in Iraq, and in so many cases it was right,” she says. Continue reading

On a bullet-scarred side street in Baghdad’s downtown, where U.S. Marines famously helped tear down the statue of Saddam Hussein in April of 2003, an inconspicuous entryway tucked between a steel-shuttered shop and a rickety candy stall leads to a flight of steep concrete stairs. Rusted water pipes run precariously over and across the poorly lit top step, tripping first-time visitors. The second-floor landing bottlenecks into a dark, empty hallway. Women in black abayas hurry across the buckled floor tiles in silence and quickly disappear through an unmarked plywood door on the right. Continue reading

BY DOUG IRELAND: As the murder campaign targeting Iraqi gays intensifies, a leading Arabic television network last week revealed the use of a horrifying new form of lethal torture against Iraqi gay men – anti-gay Shiite death squads are sealing their anuses with a powerful glue, then inducing diarrhea, which leads to a painful and agonizing death. Continue reading

After seven years of occupation, women in Iraq still suffer from insecurity and outrageous misogynist practices of the Islamist and nationalist ruling militias. The multiplying anti-women media of the ruling militias attempt to abort all our modern achievements for women’s rights. Their media shows women who veil their presence from the society with ragged historic wear, thus announcing their total submission to the newly created male-chauvinist culture in Iraq. Continue reading

Condemn the killings of women in Basra and Umara. he southern cities of Iraq which are totally under the grip of Islamist parties have turned into no-woman zones. Female physical appearance is not acceptable in the streets, educational institutions, or at work places. Although veiled and passive, death awaits women around street corners, in the market, and visits them inside their homes daily in the city of Basra. Continue reading

Condemn another hideous stoning of an 11 years old girl in Kurdistan: Sara Jaffar Nimat is an 11-year-old girl from the town of Khanaqin in Iraqi Kurdistan. She was murdered on the 3rd August.  Continue reading

By Houzan Mahmoud, from the Organisation of Women’s Freedom in Iraq: What the brutal ‘honour killing’ of a girl in Iraq’s Kurdistan province shows about the country’s headlong descent into sectarian violence. Houzan Mahmoud, an Iraqi Kurd who lives in Britain, is the overseas representative of the Organisation of Women’s Freedom in Iraq and initiator of the Campaign against Killing and Stoning of Women in Kurdistan. Continue reading