MURTKA, Iraq, 26 January 2016 — They remembered the day they were cut as if it was yesterday. Most said it happened around the age of five or six. To them, it’s the day they lost their trust in the person who brought them into this world — their mothers.

“We felt like our mothers betrayed us, that our mothers did not love us anymore.”

On an early Tuesday morning in January a group of women sat together in a mosque in Murtka village in Iraq’s Kurdistan region, to attend a discussion about female genital mutilation (FGM).

At first, they showed no signs of interest in participating in the talks. They were in a hurry to go back home to prepare lunch for their families and they were not comfortable with such a sensitive topic.

Kurdistan Resul, 31, a social worker with WADI, an NGO partner of UNICEF, has worked on preventing FGM in the Kurdistan region of Iraq for four years. She started the discussion with small talk, asking the women about their daily lives. After that, she asked them if mutilation was still a norm in the village.

Rates of FGM in Iraq are concentrated in Erbil and Sulaymaniyah Governorates in the Kurdistan region. Source: http://www.childinfo.org/files/FGCM_Lo_res.pdf

As time went on, the women started opening up. Some confessed that their experience with FGM was painful.

Communities practice FGM in the belief that it will ensure a girl’s proper marriage, chastity, or family honour.