Samira, a fair-skinned, green-eyed woman from Azerbaijan, met her Turkish husband on social media. “Our first rendezvous was in Turkey,” she told Judge Suheil Abdallah at her first hearing at the Central Criminal Court in Baghdad. “We got married, and we decided to go to live in Syria. It was 2015. We lived almost one year in Syria and one year in Iraq, where we were then divorced.” Dressed in the women’s pink uniform of the Iraqi Correctional Center, which is the prison for women north of Baghdad, she was with her 2-year-old daughter, Safiya. Samira said she was not aware of committing a crime. “Where’s your husband now?” the judge asked. “I don’t know. I lost news of him during the battle of Mosul in 2017,” she replied.
According to the 2005 Iraqi Counterterrorism Law, prisoners could be given a sentence of 15 years to life or the death penalty. Women of foreign nationality who lived in Iraq under the Islamic State’s (IS) rule risk spending 20 years in prison, which is the term of life imprisonment in Iraq.