Iraq is a source and destination country for women and children subjected to sex trafficking, and men, women, and children subjected to forced labor. An international organization alleged that police officers and other members of the security forces kidnapped women and girls and forced them into prostitution in Kirkuk and Salah ad-Din Provinces.
An NGO reported in previous years that sex traffickers rape women and girls on film and blackmail them into prostitution or recruit them in prisons by posting bail and then forcing them into prostitution through debt bondage. Some women and children are pressured into prostitution by family members to escape desperate economic circumstances. NGOs report that women are forced into prostitution in private residences, brothels, restaurants, and places of entertainment. Some women and girls are sold into "temporary marriages" within Iraq — primarily for the purpose of sexual exploitation, prostitution, or domestic servitude — by which the family of the victim receives money in the form of a dowry in exchange for permission for the woman or girl to be married for a limited period of time.
Women who flee such marriages or whose husbands divorce them are often vulnerable to further forced labor or sexual servitude. Criminal gangs reportedly subject children to forced begging and other types of forced labor in Iraq. On at least one occasion, a terrorist group recruited teenagers to take part in violent activities, to include serving as suicide bombers. The large population of internally displaced persons and refugees in Iraq are particularly at risk of being subjected to forced labor and sex trafficking.
Iraqi refugees who involuntarily return to Iraq from Syria are highly vulnerable to exploitation and trafficking in Iraq, due in part to the fact that female and child returnees typically do not have a support network or community to which they return.
The growing population of Syrian refugee men, women, and children are highly vulnerable to trafficking, as the Iraqi government restricts their access to work permits; thus, some women enter into marriages with Iraqi men for lower dowries, men enter into employment without legal work contracts, and children are increasingly pressured to engage in begging. In , NGOs and local media reported several alleged sex trafficking cases involving young Syrian refugee girls in the IKR and central provinces of Iraq.
