Sana Abdullah was only six years old when her father entered her into a form of arranged marriage.

Under such an arrangement, the girl in question is legally married but remains with her parents until a wedding is organised, normally when she is in her teens.

Now 16, Sana can’t decide whether to accept her fate or rebel.
"I'm very sad about [this] I was [only] a child,” said the girl. "I don’t know what to do."

Sana, a third-grader at a secondary school in her home town, Qaladze, 130 kilometres northeast of Sulaimaniyah, said she feels ashamed about her plight.

"Whenever my mother sits with her friends and they talk about marriage and how their daughters have got married, I feel so bad when she tells them that I was married off as a kid," Sana, who has yet to meet her husband, said bitterly.

She says that her mother also feels bad because she wasn’t aware that her husband had committed her to what’s known as an exchange marriage.

In a typical exchange marriage, a family chooses a bride for their son, and the bride’s parents, if they have sons, request that the groom’s family provide a bride for one of their children, in a kind of straight swap.