Iraqi Kurdish women find shelter from abuses as reforms take root

When Nazire got pregnant, her father vowed to kill her. Little matter that she was barely 15, or that the child she was bearing was the result of rape by the driver of the wealthy family she was working for.

According to the tribal customs still prevalent in the conservative Kurdish region in northwestern Iraq, she had defiled her family's reputation. Only her death could right that wrong.

By rights, Nazire should by now be nothing more than a statistic, a single digit added to the 382 women known to have been murdered by their families between 1998 and 2002 in the northern half of Iraqi Kurdistan alone. Instead, she is alive and living in safety with her three-year-old son, Amar.

The story of Nazire's survival is a sign of the way Iraqi Kurdistan, independent of Baghdad in all but name after 1991, has been slowly transformed.'When the incident happened, I had nobody to talk to, and it was six months before I realised what was happening to me,' she says. 'The driver told me not to worry. He told me he would sort everything out. I was only a child and I believed him.'

Instead, he abandoned her. Alone when she gave birth to her son, Nazire was separated from him the next morning. Tipped off by doctors, three policemen arrived to escort her from maternity ward to prison.

'They said it was for my own protection,' explains Nazire. 'But it was three weeks before I saw Amar again.'