Women are mothers, sisters, wives, daughters, and beloveds, with their own entity, rights, duties, and personality that shape society as a whole. They are the universities from whose womb generations, nations, and leaders emerge. A mother alone can create all this—so imagine all her roles and qualities. As Al-Rusafi said, “The mother is a school; if you prepare her, you prepare a good nation.” But the opposite is true if she is neglected, marginalized, excluded, imprisoned, tortured, and humiliated… What would society look like in all its facets?
Iraq is the second worst place for women to live, where half of the population consists of women. Women face murder, kidnapping, disappearance, and forced marriage. Random arrests of women and girls occur at all ages, accompanied by torture in the depths of prisons and detention centers. Iraqi women, in particular, suffer exploitation and oppression along ethnic, sectarian, and religious lines by individuals, political parties, militias, and sectarian, religious, and tribal gangs who adorn themselves in religious clothing and hide behind the dark cloak of religious authorities in all its forms and projects. Women have paid a high price for the collapse of the rule of law and the absence of security in society, which has caused a breach and imbalance in moral and civil rights for women, resulting in unprecedented setbacks in the status of women in Iraqi society.
All forms of discrimination, violence, oppression, and marginalization have surfaced on every level, in addition to the losses women endure socially, legally, and in the media under the unjust civil and personal status laws, which crush any outlet through which Iraqi women could gain even basic rights, leaving them with nothing but the aspiration to live with dignity. Even this aspiration was impossible under a backward, authoritarian society with archaic, dark laws, erased from the face of civilization and thrown into the abyss of legal and societal backwardness in Iraq.
The causes may vary, but the oppression and persecution remain the same against this marginalized societal component, which seeks the simplest human right: to live with dignity. This dignity has been stripped from Iraqi women through all kinds of barbaric means, brutal repression, and retrogressive, savage coercion aimed at erasing their entity and leaving them as mere shadows, less than zero, under programs of oppression, marginalization, and retrogressive, sectarian, and religious humiliation.
Arresting and detaining women has become a normalized phenomenon in Iraq—not for crime or legal violation, but simply as a means of pressuring their husbands, fathers, or brothers into confessions, blackmail, or abandonment of positions and opinions. These raids, arrests, and kidnappings occur under the eyes and ears of the Ministries of Defense and Interior, carried out by religious militias branching from these ministries to bypass official arrest warrants issued by the faltering Iraqi judiciary, which is a lifeless scarecrow of legal texts. The cries and suffering of widows and girls under the lashes of sectarian government militias do not revive these laws nor awaken the consciences of corrupt judges and lawyers, whose hearts and souls have long lost all compassion and humanity.
Many women in detention suffer in overcrowded cells—three times the intended capacity—usually without beds or healthcare. Many are detained with their children, deprived of basic childhood rights, freedom, education, and healthcare, not to mention the type of food, drink, clothing, and the extreme conditions inside the prison, where temperatures reach 60°C in summer and below freezing in winter, with power outages and contaminated water. Any infernal device imaginable could not compare to what they endure, even in the worst scenarios of Hollywood horror films.
A human rights activist reported that during his work with a human rights organization, he witnessed and heard horrifying stories showing the degradation of the judiciary, which serves political parties and militias controlling security institutions. He recounted the abuses in these prisons, including severe beatings with electric wires and sticks, hanging by the feet, electric shocks, nail extraction, and sexual assault. Some detainees were even traded by officers and officials for money or services.
Most of the detention staff belong to dirty sectarian militias that advise harsh treatment of activists, human rights defenders, and protesters, forcing them to listen to religious sermons and fatwas from religious authorities to “correct” the liberal thinking of activists according to the retrogressive ideology of Iranian militias and their proxies inside Iraq’s prisons and detention centers.
The suffering does not end after release. As human rights activist Hanaa Adour says, some families kill women after their release (to “wash the shame”), as some ignorant people do. Iraqi women have thus become trapped between the executioner and the prisoner’s family, which lies in wait to kill her after release, believing she was raped in detention. Parliamentary and governmental claims, which are legal covers for Iranian militias and gangs, claim they monitor and visit prisons regularly. However, the reports are embellished, as if describing five-star hotels where detainees live.
A detainee in Justice Prison in Kadhimiya, Baghdad, said that the guards threatened women with the most horrific forms of torture if any information about violations inside the prison walls was leaked. Visits by human rights organizations are prepared a week in advance, with cells cleaned and food improved, and women are instructed to give specific, brief answers. Any deviation leads to the worst forms of torture and abuse. Arresting and exploiting women has become a source of wealth for corrupt judges and influential militia members, who extort families to pay up to $100,000 to release detainees. Some families are forced to sell their homes, furniture, and cars to pay the price of corruption in Iraq’s militia-controlled judicial system.
Even mothers are not spared. Nada, a detainee from Baqubah, said her activist husband had an arrest warrant issued against him. Militias came to her house, and when he was absent, they arrested her instead, holding her with her five children to pressure her husband to surrender. He had to turn himself in to release his wife, and there is still no information about him.
Similarly, Israa Rabee, detained in Hilla Prison south of Baghdad, was injected under the pretext of a mistake. Her health worsened, and she was transferred to Baghdad Prison. Despite her pleas for medical help, guards ignored her, and she later died. These cases continue regularly. According to UN reports, two-thirds of women sentenced to death are executed brutally, often after being tortured to extract confessions.
This cycle of judicial corruption operates under the Iranian militias’ influence and the corrupt religious authorities in Iraq and Iran.