Um Ahmad, as she was known to the girls, had it all planned out. From Baghdad to the border and on to Damascus and a new life. Mona and her three Iraqi friends didn’t need to worry about a thing.
The job in the textiles factory just outside the Syrian capital would pay $300 (£162) a month, travel for the long journey was already arranged, a place for the girls to stay was ready and waiting and – best of all – Um Ahmad would pay Mona’s father a full one month’s salary in advance of her departure.
For the 26-year-old eldest daughter of eight children whose parents faced a daily despair of car bombs and poverty in their Baghdad slum, the offer sounded too good to be true. It was.
Within a week of arriving in Damascus, Mona – whose name has been changed to protect her identity – had been plied with alcohol by Um Ahmad, required to dance for “friends of the factory owner” and had lost her virginity.
Unable to return to her family, due to the perceived shame she had brought upon them, Mona began her new life in Syria as a prostitute working for Um Ahmad, dancing in bars outside Damascus and sleeping with clients afterwards. She was another victim of the increasing sex trade among around half a million – possibly more – Iraqi refugees in Syria whose plight aid agencies say the international community continues to ignore.
Ann Maymann, a protection officer at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Damascus, asks: “Who in the international community wants to say there is a refugee crisis in Syria and Jordan? Because saying that is to admit that the US-led war created the conditions for this.”
International aid agencies are publishing the first comprehensive report into the plight of Iraqi refugees in Syria since the start of the Iraq war in 2003. They estimate that 450,000 Iraqi refugees now live there, and warn of increasing prostitution among Iraqi women and girls, some as young as 12 years old, and find evidence of “organised networks dealing with the sex trade”.
You have to be careful when you look at data from international aid agencies. Many of them are far lefties, i.e. utopians and not sympathetic to American/British objectives in the middle east.