BLOG: Lightening the Load: Women's Detention Centers in Iraq

Among our activities as an organization is to distribute humanitarian aid to women detained at the Directorate of Transfers in Kirkuk. Female detainees suffer from infirmity and lack of decent accommodations. The Ministry of the Interior does not ensure that it provides anything for them save basic meals of food and water, which would put them in a poor psychological state if it weren't for what civil society organizations gave them. Listed is a group of pictures, in which we were not allowed to photograph or show the faces of the detainees pictured.

The Directorate of Transfers is the principal center where detained women are placed until the sentence is issued for their cases. Women are not allowed to remain in police stations for more than several hours, as there are no female staff to deal with them there, and likewise there are no women's only cells. So any woman given her sentence is a woman under arrest for investigation or the existence of accusations or suspicions against her, and so must submit herself to a search at a police station, where she is then arrested and brought to the detainee transfer station in Kirkuk.

These women then remain there until they are transferred to specialized detention centers, due to a lack of facilities in Kirkuk – for both men and women. The Detainee Transfer Station in Kirkuk has a ward for men and one for women, at which point the men are then moved for a period of at least 2 weeks.

Criticism of this directorate is that it is a place of residence for these prisoners, but without any humanitarian conditions provided. There are no covers for mattresses, no accessories, no cleaning materials – they simply provide three meals a day. The Directorate of Transfers is essentially a link on the road between the police station and female detention centers. There is often a large number of children present, as many of the women were pregnant while under arrest and had nowhere to give birth, house and care for them aside from their cells. The detention centers also fail to separate young women from the elderly, which is considered an important distinction, as there are vast differences in attitude, values and behavior among the older and younger generations.

A woman might be detained for as much as a year with no ruling on her case, and despite this long period of time spent in the Directorate of Transfers they are still provided with no more than three meals a day. The Directorate's excuse for this is that it does not provide material to prisoners until they are transferred to official prisons following their ruling. The inmates carry unbearable burdens, like not even having mattresses in the event of their arrest, which has caused previous inmates to donate mattresses and clothes of their own to the new ones due to the spread of various skin diseases. They live together in two large rooms regardless of their large numbers, other sicknesses among them, in wet cells without suitable bathrooms, despite the fact that the number of detainees in a cell can be up to 25, as well as their children.

Because of all this, various civil society organizations have taken up the cause to support the female detainees as much as they can regarding their humanitarian needs, for items such as cleaning materials, underwear, outer garments, toothpaste, women's hygienic pads, lice medicine, shampoo, towels, Kleenex. Likewise, special occasions have brought the donation of religious and educational books.