‘Modern slavery’: Trapped in Iraq, Nigerian women cry out for help

Nigerian women recruited to work as domestic helpers in the Middle Eastern country say they face severe abuse.

Sometimes when the pain hits, Agnes* has to pause for several seconds to ride out the excruciating wave. It feels like someone has tied a rope to her insides and is pulling and twisting it, the 27-year-old Nigerian domestic worker says, making it hard to bend or stand up straight.

Agnes’s ordeal started in March in the Iraqi city of Basra when her boss raped her at gunpoint. She fell pregnant, and the man then forced her to undergo a painful abortion. It was so difficult, Agnes said, that she could not sit for three days. Since then, the severe abdominal pains won’t go away, and there’s no one to take her to a hospital.

“I just want to go home and treat myself, but I can’t do that,” Agnes said on a phone call from Basra, where she is holed up in a hostel belonging to the recruiting firm that hired her from Nigeria last year. “The man has refused to pay my salary. I don’t know if I am pregnant, but I have not seen my menstruation since then. I just want to go home and check myself and see what’s happening inside me,” she added, her voice breaking.

Al Jazeera is not mentioning Agnes’s real name because she fears reprisals from the staff of the so-called recruiting agency. She is one of hundreds, if not thousands, of people who are caught in a transnational labour network that often sees women from Nigeria and other African countries deceived into domestic servitude in Iraqi cities, activists said.

In Nigeria, the women are hired by a ring of local “agents” who sell them a dream of good pay and good conditions abroad. They get the women to agree, process visas and send them off to recruitment firms in Iraq for a commission of about $500 per woman, according to activists familiar with the system.