Two months after US-led troops invaded Iraq on March 19, 2003, a group of armed men abducted fifteen-year-old Muna B. and her two sisters while they were walking to a market near their home in the port city of Basra. The men jumped out of a taxi next to the three sisters, covered the eyes and mouths of the terrified girls, and whisked them away.

Muna later told Johanna Bjorken, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, that the men held her and her sisters, ages eleven and sixteen, at a house with seven other young children, ages six to fourteen. On the first day of the girls’ arrival, one of the men whipped the children with a plastic hose to punish them for crying. The next day, the men separated Muna from her sisters and put her in a room alone. It was during this time she heard them rape her older sister. “They did bad things to my sister,” she later recalled. “They beat her, and they did bad things. One night, I heard her shouting, and then a week later, they brought her to me, but only for one hour. She told me that they had slept with her; she was crying. She only told me about that one night, but she said that all [four men] did it.”

On several occasions, the men brought other people who looked the children over, the way one might examine a cow at a cattle market. Muna believed them to be traffickers who were going to bid on children:

“They brought in people they wanted to sell us to. They would bring men, they would look at us, and then bargain, negotiate a price. One was a fat woman wearing a veil, and another time two men came. They bargained and negotiated the prices, they would talk and laugh but not let us know, the [buyers] would ask how much, and then [the captors] would wink their eyes and say, ‘Don’t talk now, in front of them.’ … Then they would talk to us, saying, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll make you happy, we’ll give you a happy life, don’t worry, don’t cry.’ … I think they wanted us to be dancers or something like that, they told us that.”