Iraqi women turning into prostitutes: Report

NEW YORK: Thousands of Iraqi women and teenage girls who fled to Syria in the face of increasing violence and insecurity in their own country are unable to find any work and turning into prostitutes, according to aid workers.

Many among them who were devout schools girls, modest in dress, wore hijab and said prayers everyday are being forced to take up the oldest profession to help their families to survive, it added.

The 'New York Times' quoted aid workers as saying that as violence in Iraq has increased, the refugee population has come to include more female-headed households and unaccompanied women.

"So many of the Iraqi women arriving now are living on their own with their children because the men in their families were killed or kidnapped," Sister Marie-Claude Naddaf, a Syrian nun at the Good Shepherd convent in Damascus, which helps Iraqi refugees, told the paper.

She was quoted as saying the convent had surveyed Iraqi refugees living in Masaken Barzeh, on the outskirts of Damascus, and found 119 female-headed households in one small neighborhood. Some of the women, seeking work outside the home for the first time and living in a country with high unemployment, find that their only marketable asset is their bodies.

"I met three sisters-in-law recently who were living together and all prostituting themselves," Sister Marie-Claude said.

"They would go out on alternate nights, each woman took her turn and then divide the money to deed all the children."

Sister Marie-Claude version is collaborated by a United Nations report which found last year that that many girls and women in 'severe need' turn to prostitution in secret or even with the knowledge or involvement of family members.

In many cases the 'head of the family brings clients to the house,' it added.

The United Nations High commissioner for refugees to 1.2 million Iraqi refugees now live in Syria, the Syrian government puts the figure even higher.

For more than three years after the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Times says Iraqi prostitution in Syria, like any prostitution, was a forbidden topic for Syria's government.

Like drug abuse, the sex trade tends to be referred to in the local news media as acts against public decency, the report said but quoted Dietrun G|nther, an official at the United Nations refugee agency's Damascus office, as saying the government is finally breaking its silence.