Two weeks into Mariam’s forced marriage to her cousin according to Iraqi tribal custom, she desperately doused herself in fuel, flicked on a lighter and attempted suicide by self-immolation.
The 22-year-old spent three days in hospital in Iraq’s southern Misan province last summer before succumbing to her wounds, recalled sheikh Haydar Saadoun
.
“A university classmate from a different tribe had proposed, but her relatives refused,” said Saadoun, an official from the Bani Lam tribe in the town of Amarah in Misan. “They said they had rights over her because of ‘nahwa’,” he said, referring to a tribal custom that authorises the men of a clan to reject marriage proposals to a female member.
They arranged for her to wed her cousin instead. “He was already married, had fathered multiple children and was illiterate, while Mariam was going to university,” Saadoun said.
Wearing a modern three-piece suit under a traditional cape, he told AFP he tried to dissuade Mariam’s fiance but was overruled. “He told me: ‘I’ll break her nose. I’ll marry her and rub her face in it’,” Saadoun recounted.
Iraqi society remains largely conservative, bound by tribal traditions and religious customs practised from its sprawling capital Baghdad to far-flung rural provinces. In the country of nearly 40 million, clan names can carry weight in securing work, a spouse and even votes. They often trump government institutions, as tribes look to their own mediation methods to resolve disputes instead of the official court
system.
Women and girls often suffer under these patriarchal systems, with many forced to marry against their will, subject to domestic abuse and deprived of an education.
In Misan, 35 percent of married women between 20 and 45 said they wed as teenagers, and in Basra the rate is 31.5 percent. In one tribal custom known as “fasliya”, women are married off as restitution for blood spilt between two tribes.
