SINJAR, Iraq - With her father sitting nearby, 16-year-old Jenan Merza
struggled to explain why she was lying in bed recovering from a gunshot wound.
“I didn’t know the gun was loaded,” she said, resting
under a red-and-gold blanket in a stark room with a bare concrete floor.
A couple of moments later, after her father left the
room to fix tea and coffee, she cried softly and admitted what really happened,
how she had shot herself in the abdomen with her brother’s Glock pistol after
first trying with a Kalashnikov rifle — a weapon too long to point at herself
and pull the trigger.
“I tried to kill myself,” she said. “I didn’t want to get married. I was forced to get engaged.”
Ayman Oghanna for The New York Times
Jenan Merza, 16, forced to wed a cousin, shot herself.
In this desolate and tradition-bound community in the
northwest corner of Iraq, at the foot of a mountain range bordering Syria, Ms.
Merza’s reaction to the ancient custom of arranged marriage is becoming more
common. Officials are alarmed by what they describe as a worsening epidemic of
suicides, particularly among young women tormented by being forced to marry too
young, to someone they do not love.
While reliable statistics on anything are hard to come
by in Iraq, officials say there have been as many as 50 suicides this year in
this city of 350,000 — at least double the rate in the United States — compared with
80 all of last year. The most common methods among women are self-immolation
and gunshots.
Among the many explanations given, like poverty and
madness, one is offered most frequently: access to the Internet and to
satellite television, which came after the start of the war. This has given
young women glimpses of a better life, unencumbered by the traditions that have
constricted women for centuries to a life of obedience and child-rearing, one
devoid of romance.
“The society had been closed, and now it is open to the
rest of the world,” said Kheri Shingli, an official in a local political party
and a writer and journalist. “They feel they are not living their life well
compared to the rest of the world.”
Last year the International Organization for Migration
conducted a study on the growing suicide problem in Sinjar, where mental health
services do not exist, and concluded that “the marginalization of women and the
view of the woman’s role as peripheral contributed to the recent suicides.” A
report compiled this year by a researcher at a local health center concluded,
“The way to solve this is to put an end to forced marriages.”
That will probably not happen soon. In assigning blame
for the rise in suicides, many people here mentioned the Turkish soap opera
“Forbidden Love.” A romantic drama of the upper class, it is a favorite program
of women here, and some people say it provides an unrealistic example of the
lives that could be available outside Sinjar.
Ms. Merza said she watched the show, and she admitted,
“I wish I had that life,” but her anguish seems more basic. At 16, she wants to
remain a child.
“I want to stay with my mom and not go back to my
husband,” she said.
Ms. Merza’s father, Barkat Hussein, interviewed later
in private, said he was aware that the shooting was not an accident.
“We gave her to her cousin less than 20 days ago,” he
said. “She accepted him. Like anyone who gets married, she should be happy.”
He said he would not force her to return to her
husband, who lives next door. But, he said: “I hope she will go back to him.
His father is my brother.”
He, too, blamed the Turkish soap opera for his
daughter’s unhappiness, and he nodded toward the room where his wife was
working. “I got married to my cousin,” he said. “I wasn’t in love with her, but
we are here, living together. That’s what happens here, we marry our
relatives.”
Like Ms. Merza’s family, a majority of the inhabitants
here are Yazidis, who speak Kurdish but adhere to a religion that combines
elements of Islam and strains of ancient Persian religions. Among their beliefs
is a special reverence for a figure called Melek Taus, whom Muslims regard as
Satan. For this, they have often been branded as devil worshipers, which has justified
historical oppression of the sect by extremist Muslims.
In 2007, Sinjar suffered the deadliest coordinated terrorist attack of the war
years, when several trucks packed with explosives and driven by suicide bombers
exploded, killing nearly 500 people and destroying the same number of homes,
most of which were made of mud.
The town’s economy has historically relied on tobacco and
figs, but neglect and war have rendered the agriculture industry dormant, and
many men seek work as day laborers in the Kurdish
cities of Erbil and Sulaimaniya. Its proximity to Syria means that refugees
come from the west, and smugglers of cigarettes and weapons for the Syrian
rebels trace their path back.
The area is a cordoned-off no man’s land, where neither
the central government nor the Kurdish regional government seems to have much
control.
A visitor here might notice a big blue sign on the
outskirts that reads, almost mockingly, “Happy Land,” the name for a
dilapidated amusement park. In the early 1970s, the opening scenes of “The
Exorcist” were filmed here among the ancient Yazidi shrines.
Officials here say that some cases that are judged as
suicides are actually honor killings, in which family members kill women who
commit adultery or seek to marry outside their religion or class and then cover
it up by claiming suicide.
“This happens, too,” said Dr. Majia Khalaf, who runs a
government health center.
In one recent case, a father tried to claim that his
19-year-old daughter had stabbed herself to death, but her brothers were being
held on suspicion of murder.
The father, Abdella Hassan, said that he had recently
married his daughter to her cousin, and that shortly after the wedding she
began “talking nonsense” and having hallucinations.
He took her to a Yazidi sheik, who said the devil had
overtaken her and who advised an exorcism rite that involved covering herself
in dust from a Yazidi shrine. Before the rite could be performed, the father
said, he found her dead.
“I saw her happy in her marriage,” he said. “It wasn’t that.”