PEREGRAF- Ghamgin Mohammed
Warda, a young Arab woman, married an older Kurdish man earlier this year as part of a fraud scheme organized with her real husband, Jasm. Once the marriage was formalized, they planned to abscond with the marriage gold that the victim had given her, but their plan was discovered and she was brought before a court in Halabja.
Asked by the judge how many times the pair had attempted such a fraud, the 27-year-old woman admitted that it was the seventh time in eighteen months.
In court, the judge declared that Jasm and Warda —not their real names— had committed a crime under both Iraqi law and Islamic law, which he called "trafficking marriage of women by their spouses."
A lawyer familiar with the case told Peregraf that the Warda had separated from some of her victim husbands on various pretexts or simply fled from others. Some of the marriage contracts are being adjudicated in court, while others were not formally recognized.
The pair were caught when Jasm called Warda one night and told her to take her marriage gold and run away, but the man she had married understood Arabic and overheard them. When she tried to make her getaway, she was caught and handed over to the police, said the lawyer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case.
Jasm escaped and has not been arrested.
"I have seen many such cases in the courts of the Kurdistan Region," the lawyer told Peregraf, adding that it usually involves a young, Arab couple targeting an elderly, Kurdish man.
"Other times, the Arab woman's first husband presents himself as a father or brother and goes to the Kurdish man and asks him to divorce her and give them the marriage money. He then takes his wife from the Kurdish man with 30 to 40 ounces of gold and they go to another city for a new marriage and to trick someone else," he said.
According to an investigation by Peregraf, such frauds occur regularly in the Kurdistan Region and Iraq, but most cases do not become public because of religious and social considerations.
According to Iraq's 1959 Marriage Law, a condition for marriage is that a woman is not mahram, a term indicating someone who is not marriable under Islamic law, which includes that she is not married to someone else.
According to Article 376 of the Iraqi Penal Code No. 111 of 1969, in general, any person who enters into a marriage contract with fraudulent intent will be sentenced to up to seven years in prison.
There are no specific laws that criminalize a woman marrying more than one man, but laws related to adultery and prostitution are sometimes applied in fraud cases. For instance, Article 377 of the Iraqi Penal Code imposes a prison term for adultery.
Vena Bakr, another lawyer, told Peregraf that it is becoming more common for women to be used by their husbands in this way to earn money.
"Instead of isolated cases, it is about to become a phenomenon. It now exists in the towns, not just the big cities," she said. "I handled such a case in court and it has become a kind of way to make a living."
Since there is no law to address the specific issue of husbands using their wives to engage in marriage fraud, Bakr said that the circumstances determine what charges can be brought against the women and the men.
Peregraf has also identified cases where the husband used his wife to blackmail victims. In some cases, the wife will connect with another man over social media and agree to meet. They then take sexually compromising footage of the victim that they threaten to publish.
In other instances, the woman will arrange to meet the victim at her home and her husband will come home and pretend to have caught them in a compromising situation. They then extort money out of the victim.
Beyond the financial and legal aspects of the cases, several observers have noted that there are moral and religious dimensions to the frauds.
"Husbands using their wives to make money is an unusual crime in the Kurdish community and, in recent years, the spread and misuse of social media has increased openness and mixing with different cultures and communities," Soz Ali, a social researcher, told Peregraf.
Salahaddin Muhammad, a preacher and lecturer at the Nza Mosque, told Peregraf that husbands using their wives like this is incorrect and abnormal and is forbidden under Islam.
"A man who does this to his wife is called Dioth-Gawad and, according to the law, the man and woman who agree with the work will not smell paradise and will not enter it," Muhammad said.
The preacher stressed that religious and community leaders are aware of the cases, but have decided not to publicize them because of the shame that it would bring to the victims’ families.
In contrast, Ali believes it is necessary for all groups, particularly civil society organizations, to highlight these cases so that people can protect themselves and their families and for courts to prosecute perpetrators.