End Slavery Now!

On the streets of Damascus, you find men selling corn on the cob, chanting in Arabic.  You find women in bright red heels walking next to women in nekabs, fully covering their faces and bodies.  Kids playing games in front of the teal mosaic of a mosque.  You find the winding alleys of the Old City, and minarets peaking out over the horizon, and houses scattered over the steep mountain, the Jebel.  As you go towards the Southern end of Damascus, you find Jeremanah, the predominantly Iraqi neighborhood.  And if you go slightly further, along the Southern city outskirts, you can easily find some not-so-hidden secrets.

Ask any cab driver, any of those men selling corn on cob from their sidewalk stands, and they could tell you about the area on the edge of Damascus that is known for Iraqi prostitution.  They could tell you about the Maraba roads famous for brothels, and the highways that are lined with “nightclubs.”  There you can find not only scantily-clad women dancing, waiting for a man to “choose” them, but also girls as young as twelve sporting red lipstick and waiting for the same fate.

Since the war in Iraq began in 2003, over 2 million Iraqis have crossed borders and now live as refugees.  After this influx, an estimated 10% of Syria’s 18 million people are Iraqis.  Between 80 and 90 percent of these Iraqis live in and around Damascus.  After leaving their lives of violent struggles and destroyed homes in Iraq, they now face new struggles in Syria.  While Syria has certainly opened its doors to the Iraqi population in a time of need, one simple stamp in their passports as they cross the Iraq-Syria border takes away so much: a stamp that reads “Employment Prohibited.”  They are not entitled to work in Syria, and there are no clear plans laid out on how to integrate Iraqis legally, economically, or politically. 

Additionally, female-headed households account for almost a quarter of the refugees registered with the United Nations High Commission of Refugees in Damascus.  Many of these women are widowed, divorced, or separated from their husbands by war, and most have families to support. Without the rights to find legal work, many have turned to the “underground” sex market.  Iraqi women in these areas often engage in prostitution as a last means for supporting their families, but increasingly, they are tricked or forced into prostitution.  Some nightclubs (i.e. brothels) allow women to work essentially “freelance;” they are able to walk in for free, dance, and only pay the bouncer if they leave with a man.  Other brothels don’t allow for so much freewill… and other brothels don’t deal with women, but girls.  Over the last five years, Damascus has become a destination for sex tourism, thriving with low-priced Iraqi prostitutes, many of them young girls.

Deborah Amos, an NPR reporter and author, interviewed several of these women for her book Eclipse of the Sunnis.  She wrote, “Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of the Iraqi exiles in Syria had turned to the sex trade for survival.  Nearly every war brings prostitution.  But in Damascus, girls as young as ten were forced into the trade by parents- fathers or mothers, who made the deal and lived off the proceeds.”

Increasingly, families, from parents to husbands, traffic their daughters and wives.  Families bring these girls to nightclubs, where they are forced to work as prostitutes. 

 “Not all of them do it willingly.  The husbands threaten.  Often a woman will get married just to get out of Iraq and then will be forced into prostitution when she gets here,” said Asir Madaien, a protection officer at the United Nations High Commission for Refugees in Damascus, to Amos.  She said that the youngest prostitute she had seen was a twelve year-old girl, who was accompanied by two men from the Gulf.

Madaien noted that there is a problem reaching out to families, even when assistance in the form of money and educational opportunities is provided.  “Even when you get a girl released, if the family is involved, she will soon disappear.”  The sex-trafficking around Damascus is being spurred mostly by families themselves.

Dietrun Günther, another official at the UNHCR in Damascus, expressed her concern over this human-trafficking in a New York Times article, saying, “We’re especially concerned that there are young girls involved, and that they’re being forced, even smuggled into Syria in some cases.”

The effects of the Iraq war are so often viewed in a purely political sense; undoubtedly the effects extend from increased sectarian tensions to a government in question to long-lasting consequences for American troops and their families.  But some of the less obvious effects involve young Iraqi women and children, forced by their families to prostitute themselves.  The less obvious victim is a young girl, who struggled her way out of Iraq and into the beautiful city of Damascus, the City of Jasmine, for a chillingly ugly life in human-trafficking. It is important that the world doesn’t ignore her, but attempts to protect her; it is important that she is given the chance for her voice to be heard.