Forced marriages drive many girls to suicide in Iraq province
amarah — Two weeks into Mariam’s forced marriage to her cousin according to Iraqi tribal custom, she desperately doused herself in fuel, flicked on a lighter and attempted suicide by self-immolation.
The 22-year-old spent three days in hospital in Iraq’s southern Misan province last summer before succumbing to her wounds, recalled Haydar Saadoun.
“A university classmate from a different tribe had proposed, but her relatives refused,” said Saadoun, an official from the Bani Lam tribe in the town of Amarah in Misan.
“They said they had rights over her because of ‘nahwa’,” he said, referring to a custom that authorises the men of a clan to reject marriage proposals to a female member.
They arranged for her to wed her cousin instead.
Wearing a modern three-piece suit under a traditional cape, he said he tried to dissuade Mariam’s fiance but was overruled.
“He told me: ‘I’ll break her nose,” Saadoun recounted.
Iraqi society remains largely bound by customs practised from its sprawling capital Baghdad to far-flung rural provinces.
Women and girls often suffer under these systems, with many forced to marry against their will, subject to domestic abuse and deprived of an education.
The southern provinces of Misan and Basra, where tribal influence is widespread, have the highest rates of child marriage in Iraq, the United Nations’ children’s agency Unicef said in 2018.
In Misan, 35 per cent of married women between 20 and 45 said they wed as teenagers, and in Basra the rate is 31.5 per cent.
In one tribal custom, women are married off as restitution for blood spilt between two tribes.
Karima Al Tai, a women’s rights activist in Misan, said the custom had ravaged her own family.
“Twenty years ago, a conflict broke out between my tribe and another. During the fighting, a man from the other clan was killed,” said Tai, 50. Calling for a truce, Tai’s tribe offered “five girls” to the opposing tribe — including her cousin, Sahar, who was married off to the victim’s brother. Over “20 years of hell” Sahar was bullied and harassed by her husband’s family, Tai recalled.
But when Sahar asked her family for help, said Tai, “her relatives would tell her, ‘Accept your fate’.”
This custom is still being practised.
In 2015, a tribe in the southern province of Basra married off 50 girls and women to another tribe under a truce.
With no family support or access to outside help, some Iraqi women and girls have turned to suicide.
A 2017 study of 62 attempted self-immolation cases in Basra found that family problems, including marital issues, were the precipitating factor in 80 per cent of the cases.
Authorities in Misan said 198 women had attempted suicide over the past two years, and 14 of them lost their lives. But details are scarce. Mental health problems in Iraq remain taboo, and efforts to discuss them with tribal leaders have seen little success.
Even Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the top religious authority for most Iraqi Shias, called last year for an end to “nahwas” and other tribal practices, to no avail. The customs were criminalised in Iraq’s 1959 personal status law, which was strictly implemented under Saddam Hussein’s rule. —
Now this law [that criminalises such customs] is not applied because no woman would file a complaint against her own family
Intissar Al Juburi, a lawmaker