‘Modern slavery’: Trapped in Iraq, Nigerian women cry out for help
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.
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.
Once there, the Iraqi firms ask the women, called “shagalas” (meaning “house worker” in Arabic), to sign two-year contracts and assign them to families or labour-intensive institutions like spas, where they are often expected to work more than 20 hours a day for monthly pay of $200 to $250. In many homes, the women are subject to inhumane treatment: They go days without food, are beaten and are not provided living quarters.
Some, like Agnes, also face sexual abuse and rape. Several women told Al Jazeera stories of victims who had faced so much abuse and torture that they ended up dead although these cases have not been independently confirmed.
“It’s a form of modern slavery,” said Damilola Adekola, co-founder of Hopes Haven Foundation, a Nigerian NGO that helps track women in Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries where abuse of African domestic workers is rife. “These Iraqi agents and the families [the women work for] often tell them, ‘We’ve bought you, so you have to work.’ The contracts they sign go against any type of international law because there’s no medical care and they have to work obscene hours.”These women often lack knowledge of what a normal workplace should be like because the Nigerian recruiters target women from rural communities who are usually uninformed about the dangers, Adekola added. Although some have diplomas, they often don’t know about the realities of post-war Iraq or that Baghdad is not a country. “Once they hear they can get on an airplane, they just jump at the opportunity,” he said.
A chance to ‘hustle’ abroad goes badly
A native of Nigeria’s Ekiti, a small state northeast of the commercial capital, Lagos, Agnes was working as a domestic worker at home when she heard of an opportunity that could take her abroad.
She paid 100,000 naira ($64) to a local recruiting agent, a family friend whom she trusted, believing that she would be able to make much more money to send home to her ailing mother and nine-year-old son.
Soaring inflation in Nigeria has crippled the naira since 2019. The result has been that Nigerians, young and old, are leaving the country to seek better opportunities. According to an Afrobarometer report this month, more than half of the 200 million population indicated they want to leave the country due to economic hardship with most looking at Europe, North America and the Middle East.
For Agnes, domestic work anywhere else and with the promise of pay that was three times what she normally earned, was an answered prayer. She left for Basra from Lagos airport in September 2023 and arrived at the Iraqi recruitment firm she had been “sold” to after a day’s journey.
