Sex Slaves Recount Ordeals

Asma's family was facing dire financial problems when a man in his 60s came to her father with an offer they couldn't refuse: he said he would hire Asma for 200 US dollars a month to help take care of his wife, who was handicapped.

Asma's mother is blind and her father is disabled, leaving them struggling to make ends meet. The man assured the couple that Asma could visit them, and that he would raise her with his daughters. The impoverished family took him up on the offer, but Asma, 17, had no idea what was in store for her.

"My work was not only in the kitchen; I had to have sex with son of the man who hired me and his four or five friends," she said in an interview after fleeing a life of sexual slavery. "I left my father's house a virgin and now I am… "

She stopped speaking. Her father said nothing except, "I put my trust in God.”

The deteriorating security situation and absence of law and order has allowed sexual slavery to grow in Iraq, with traffickers able to sell victims without fear of punishment.

According to the US State Department's Trafficking in Persons Report, issued in June, Iraqi women and children are forced into prostitution and trafficked inside Iraq and abroad, to countries like Syria, Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Iran.

In the volatile northwestern city of Mosul, near the Syrian border, girls and young women from poor and illiterate families are particularly vulnerable to sexual exploitation. Many of those hired as domestic servants end up becoming sex slaves.

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