Researcher Debra McNutt has written a very provocative piece outlining the role prostitution plays in the war in Iraq. As she notes, most of the evidence is anecdotal, this is not an easy subject to research. Her work dovetails with a report that we highlighted on this blog several weeks ago about women suing KBR as well as a recent story in The Independent reporting that 50,000 Iraqi refugee women in Syria have been forced to resort to prostitution in order to feed their families. McNutt writes,
“During the brief (first) Gulf War, the U.S. military prevented prostitution for its troops in Saudi Arabia, to avoid a backlash from its hosts. But on their return home, the troop ships stopped in Thailand for “R & R.â€? After the Gulf War, harsh economic sanctions forced many desperate Iraqi women into prostitution. The sex trade grew to such an extent that in 1999 Saddam ordered his paramilitary forces to crack down on it in Baghdad, resulting in the executions of many women.
The U.S. invasion of March 2003 brought prostitution back to Iraq within a matter of weeks. The Iraq War has now lasted eight times longer than the Gulf War deployments, and is marked by a huge reliance on private security contractors. A U.S. ban on human trafficking, signed by President Bush in January 2006, has not been applied to these contractors.
The rebirth of prostitution has generated fear that permeates all of Iraqi society. Families keep their girls inside, not only to keep them from being assaulted or killed, but to prevent them from being kidnapped by organized prostitution rings. Gangs are also forcing some families to sell their children into sex slavery. The war has created an enormous number of homeless girls and boys who are most vulnerable to the sex trade. It has also created thousands of refugee women who try to escape danger but end up (out of economic desperation) being prostituted in Jordan, Syria, Yemen or the UAE. Our occupation not only attacks women on the outside, but attacks them on the inside, until there is nothing left to destroy.
If foreign women are imported into Iraq for prostitution, they would almost certainly follow the already established channels of illegal labor trafficking, as documented in the Chicago Tribune series “Pipeline to Peril.� For example, independent journalist David Phinney has documented how a Kuwaiti contract company that imported workers to build the new U.S. Embassy compound in Baghdad’s Green Zone also smuggled women into the construction site.
Within the Green Zone, a few brothels have been opened (disguised as a women’s shelter, hairdresser, or Chinese restaurant) but are usually closed by authorities after reports about their existence reach the media. The U.S. military claims that it officially forbids its troops to be involved in prostitution. But private contractors brag on sex websites that they have sometimes been able to find Iraqi or foreign women in Baghdad or around U.S. military bases. These highly paid security contractors have much disposable income, and are not held accountable to anyone but their companies.”
There is little doubt that there is going to be much, much more to this story. What is very clear is that, official policy aside, the U.S. government not only knows about what is going on, but is also aiding and abetting the commodification and abuse of women’s bodies and using our tax dollars to do so.
