Iraq's Unspeakable Crime: Mothers Pimping Daughters

After an 18 year old iraqi womans husband was killed her family tried to sell her to a local brothel. There was a undercover woman posing a objedct for them to trade around. They found ut that they sell girls as young as 11 and 12 and they sell for 30000 to 2000 dollars. The trafficing of girls is not just local, but national, Syria, and Jordan are highly connected to this. No body knows the exact number to of been sold but they beleive it was to of started under the reign of Saddam.

That's where Mohammed's group first saw Atoor several years ago, at the Khadimiya Women's Prison in northern Baghdad. Now 18, Atoor married her 19-year-old sweetheart, a policeman called Bilal, when she was 15. Three months later he was dead, killed during one of the many bloody episodes in Iraq's brutal war. After the obligatory four-month mourning period dictated by Islamic Shari'a law, Atoor's mother and two brothers made it clear that they intended to sell her to a brothel close to their home in western Baghdad, just as they had sold her older twin sisters. Frightened, she told a friend in the police force to raid her home and the nearby brothel. His unit did, and Atoor spent the next two years in prison. She was not charged with anything, but that's how long it took for her to come before a judge and be released. "I wanted to go to prison — I didn't want to be sold," she says. "I didn't think it would happen to me. My mother used to spoil me. Yes, she sold my sisters, but she regretted that. I thought that she loved me."