Iraq Refugee Crisis Engulfs Women Silenced by Rape

The six kidnappers who raped Noura in Baghdad left her on the highway bleeding, her face bruised, her clothes torn and her feet bare. Her husband of 18 years was with her when she was kidnapped and he was stabbed and left for dead.

Onlookers who witnessed the kidnapping in the street, however, took Noura's husband to the hospital. The following morning, after the kidnappers pushed Noura out of their car by the highway and threatened to kill her if she described them to anyone, a minibus driver acting as a good Samaritan picked her up, gave her his own shoes and coat and dropped her off at her sister's.

The couple was reunited and a few days later they fled to Syria with their three children, partly to escape the violence and start a new life and partly to escape the stigma attached to rape victims and shield their children from ever learning of it.

"I sat in Sit Zeinab and prayed that God would strike me dead," said Noura, a 34-year-old Sunni, referring to the mosque where thousands of Iraqi refugees, mostly Shiite but some Sunni, pray in Damascus.

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