Peregraf – Farman Hamadamin
Tara Ahmed left her maternal home at a young age, with big dreams. She intended to live with her love forever and took on insurmountable challenges until she had a brush with death.
"I sacrificed part of my life for the sake of our relationship and love, and the other part for our children," Tara said, "However, I can no longer live with him. I even came face to face with death twice."
Tara is a name we’ve given to a 23-year old woman from Sulaimaniyah, as she preferred to remain anonymous. She had been married to a relative of hers for nine years. Although the marriage was an arranged one, she found love for her husband after spending the first year together.
Tara’s family had one condition that she would be allowed to finish her studies. She was living with her husband, a Peshmerga member, in their own house in Sulaimaniyah. She then graduated from university, "I was working with a women’s rights organisation. I even opened a women’s gym and fitness centre lately."
Tara recalled her husband, "He was always saying: I love you. I later understood that he used those words to calm me down. We often had problems, but we would solve them so as to avoid divorce."
Tara said her husband was frugal, but she could ignore that, "He was very frugal. However, later I understood that he wanted a house for us. "
She has been maintaining their relationship for nine years, until she was threatened with death; she then decided to take the court route.
Sulaimaniyah has seen more than 57 000 divorce cases between 2010 and 2018, from more than 300 000 marriages.
Sangar Bazzaz is a consultant lawyer. He believes that most cases, especially after 2014, are related to the financial crisis. After that, he claimed, Turkish TV series could be the reason, "Due to the financial crisis and unemployment, many people stay at home and watch Turkish TV dramas, and ask their husbands to provide the same life, as depicted in the drama."
However, he said, such prosperity is neither available for the vast majority of Turkish people.
In one case which he considered as ‘strange’, the wife asked for a divorce after her husband played Quran verses in his car, instead of making “"a romantic atmosphere" by playing the famous Arabic singer Elissa, "She asked for a divorce, claiming her husband was uneducated. "
According to official statistics, there were more than 8000 cases of divorce in 2015, with around 40 cases of marriage. In 2016, 6000 divorce cases emerged, with more than 31 000 marriage cases. In 2017, roughly 6000 divorce cases were reported, with around 40 000 marriage cases.
Tara has a son and daughter from her nine-year marriage. They supported the family’s continuity, she said.
After buying a house, their problems did not end. Tara wanted furniture, but her husband wanted a car, "In two months and a half, he changed to a completely different person. What he did could erase nine years of effort for the family."
Tara started sobbing, "Now I realise that he would not have threatened me with murder if he loved me. I think he did not love me at all. "
What made her infuriated was that her husband installed a call recorder app on her phone without her knowledge. She said it was only from jealousy as he often argued with her over the fact that people used to look at her in the marketplace, "At 10 PM, he took me by the hand to the bedroom. I said if he was jealous, I would not use my phone. However, he punished me in such a way that I shall never forget. He hit me, and later started threatening me with a Kalashnikov and a knife."
She had often found herself in that situation, and sometimes had to confess to things she never did when held at gunpoint, but later her husband regretted it and asked for forgiveness while crying.
Once, he was about to pull the trigger, but she took the gun and asked him not to kill her in front of the kids. The children had been crying. She hid the gun at a later time, but they argued for hours, "He later put us all in a room, locked it, and took all the money we had."
That night, Tara went to her parents, where they could resolve the issue. However, the peace was short-lived.
In 2018, more than 4000 cases of divorce were recorded, with more than 33 000 marriage cases.
Ari Rafiq, a researcher and an activist, believes that the involvement of extended families could play a serious role in marital breakdowns, along with the financial crisis. Some extended families control the time the younger families want to spend outside their houses and their social ties.
Rafiq works in the Department of Confronting Domestic Violence, and Violence against Women. He cited the third reason to be the misuse of social networking platforms and technology.
He said 65 per cent of divorcees are aged between 16 and 21, considering the statistics from 2015 to 2017. He said it was an indicator that early marriage could very well end up in the rapid disintegration of families.
Rafiq believes that the Kurdish society is going down a slippery slope, where the seeds of corruption, cheating, and extremism appear every day, but the reason, he said, was not only related to the families. The government plays an equally important role through the financial crisis and the shortage of essential services and needs.
Often, children are the victims. Tara’s children are suffering the same fate, "Nothing remains that you could call love. The case is in court, and I’m waiting for a [legal] divorce."