By Tim Stickings For Mailonline. Young Iraqi girls are being sold for sex in temporary 'marriages' that can last as little as an hour, a BBC documentary has revealed. Shia clerics were filmed offering 'pleasure marriages' in which men, usually banned from having sex outside marriage, can pay a dowry for an interim wife.
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Baghdad, Iraq CNN -- At one of Baghdad's two female juvenile prisons, the young Iraqi girls live in limbo, sadness and desperation permeating every aspect of their interrupted lives. Some face punishment for prostitution. Others are charged with ties to terrorism. And then there are the victims, also behind bars. Fifteen-year-old Zeina's sad journey to prison began two years ago when she says was sold into sex slavery. The family trip turned out to be a cover story, and Zeina found herself faced with the most horrific possible reality. She says she was then forcefully taken from Syria to the United Arab Emirates and sold into sexual slavery. But Zeina refused to surrender to such a horrendous fate.
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The status of women in Iraq at the beginning of the 21st century is affected by many factors: wars most recently the Iraq War , sectarian religious conflict, debates concerning Islamic law and Iraq's Constitution , cultural traditions, and modern secularism. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi women are widowed as a result of a series of wars and internal conflicts. Women's rights organizations struggle against harassment and intimidation, while they work to promote improvements to women's status in the law, in education, the workplace, and many other spheres of Iraqi life, and to curtail abusive traditional practices such as honor killings and forced marriages. During the seventh century the lamas as a part of their conquest were fighting the Persians , who were defeated. Doreen Ingrams, the author of The Awakened: Women in Iraq , stated it was a time when women's help was needed.
Rusul woke to find herself alone. Her new husband had gone. The marriage had lasted just three hours. It wasn't the teenager's first marriage.
