One man’s role in the fight against modern slavery in Kurdistan

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Police Major Sardar Fadhel Yahya’s phone buzzed with a new WhatsApp message. It was a plea for help from a woman who said she was locked in a room with little food and no clean water. She didn’t know where she was, but, at Yahya’s urging, sent her digital location via the messaging application. With that information, Yahya was able to narrow down where she was and get a court order authorizing him and his team to enter the premises. 

Yahya is head of the Erbil office of the Ministry of the Interior’s Directorate of Combating Human Trafficking. The directorate opened on June 1, 2019 as mandated by the trafficking law passed a year earlier and has branches across the Kurdistan Region. The Erbil branch is located in the capital’s Dream City neighbourhood, a gated complex of grandiose houses built on what was barren land prior to 2003 and is now home to wealthy residents, most of whom have nannies or maids. The directorate opened half empty, with a minimal staff of just under 20 people to provide the most crucial services, but plans to expand once the government lifts its austerity hiring freeze and they can get more funding. 

The office is reachable through a Facebook page and a phone number, 07509879911. They receive a lot of tips and appeals for help via WhatsApp and Viber, Yahya explained in an interview at his office on November 5. 

Armed with the court order in one hand and his police badge in the other, Yahya arrived at the house where he believed the woman had sent the WhatsApp message from. All the doors and windows were locked, but he could see a woman through the smudged glass. She refused to open the door at first, saying she didn’t have permission to do so. Flashing his credentials, Yahya convinced her to unlock the door. Inside, he found three women from Ethiopia and Ghana. One, Ellie*, was heavily pregnant. 

Ellie didn’t know she had a baby on the way when she first came to the Kurdistan Region to do housework. When she discovered the pregnancy, her employer said he would send her home to Ethiopia, “but they never did,” she said. Instead she had to continue working and didn’t see a doctor until she was rescued by Yahya and his team. She and two other women were locked in, given minimal food and the only water they had was in the bathroom. They were brought out only to work. 

Ellie had given birth just a few weeks earlier and when she and her newborn arrived at the directorate, Yahya called her into his office, skipping the growing queue of people waiting outside his door, to proudly introduce the baby boy whom Ellie named Sardar after her rescuer, “because Sardar saved my life. He’s a good man,” she said. 

“I’m known as a tough guy, but in reality I’m not,” Yahya said with a shy smile over his namesake. His office is now working to help Ellie get a travel document for baby Sardar so they can go home. 

Yahya’s staff, which include drivers, clerical workers, and police, have received specialized training. The walls behind his desk are adorned with his own certificates from schools, the government, and NGOs, and are just a sample of the qualifications he has earned. 

Developing policing procedures and training frontline workers has been a priority of the government and international organizations helping the Kurdistan Region and Iraq establish strategies to combat human trafficking. As Iraq emerged from the war against the Islamic State (ISIS), the International Organization for Migration (IOM) urged Baghdad and Erbil to turn their focus to the growing crime of human trafficking. IOM has advocated a community policing approach, solidifying relationships between the public and law enforcement. 

“With the experience of strengthening community policing across Iraq since 2015, IOM recognizes the benefits of a community engagement in identifying and preventing crimes and addressing security concerns, including human trafficking,” the organization said in an April 2019 report. IOM declined to comment for this report. 

Both IOM and the SEED Foundation, a development organization, have conducted training courses for the Kurdish police. 

SEED President Sherri Kraham Talabany said they have a good partnership with the police who make up some 70 percent of the 1,500 individuals her NGO has trained on combatting human trafficking. The others include case managers and psychologists as the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) tries to evolve, adopting a comprehensive approach. 

“In the beginning, the view was this was a human rights abuse, or a labour practicing abuse. But they didn’t see it as a trafficking issue,” Talabany explained in an interview on October 1. 

It was around 2015 that the government recognized the scope and complexity of the problem. An influx of Syrian refugees and internally displaced Iraqis found themselves easy prey for traffickers and the US State Department’s annual report on human trafficking that year had harsh words for Kurdistan Region officials, reporting that Kurdish security officers facilitated forced prostitution of women from the camps and concluding that “complicity of some Iraqi and KRG authorities contributed to and exacerbated the trafficking of men, women, and children.” 

Under pressure, the KRG started to take action, including setting up a committee that brought the ministries of foreign relations, labour, and interior together. 

Passing the law in July 2018 finally criminalized abuse of basic rights of foreign workers. Now, employers “can’t hold their papers, they can’t abuse, they can’t overwork, they should pay what they promised,” said Talabany. The KRG also stopped granting tourist visas for common source countries, closing a doorway that some traffickers exploited, and it ceased the practice of deporting trafficked foreigners – a measure that criminalizes the victim – opting for the repatriation route instead. 

SEED is also working with the Interior Ministry to develop a screening system to clearly identify a trafficking victim. At the moment, the ministry’s focus is on foreign workers. 

Yahya’s job is to investigate all cases of trafficking of foreign workers and organ selling. His office also keeps tabs on companies hiring foreigners. Many of the piles of letters the youthful-faced officer signs are communications with the labour ministry, the immigration office, and the airport – all to keep track of the people entering and exiting the Kurdistan Region. Any concerns of abuse by the sponsor, “directly we will send him to the court,” he said.

Yayha has a family himself and the long hours of his job and occasional nights spent on the couch in his office are putting strain on his home life. One evening, when his phone buzzed with a new message, his wife complained that she never gets to see him. As Yahya opened the Viber message, his wife asked if he really had to deal with it right away. 

The message on Viber included a photograph of an exhausted-looking woman, sitting on the floor with the legs of two people visible behind her. Her hands were tied in front of her with a plastic strap. Yahya showed the image to his wife and asked what he should do. Without a word, she got his coat and told him to go, help this woman. 

Getting this phone number into the public consciousness was a priority for the directorate. Foreigners new to the Kurdistan Region, especially if they don’t speak the language, often don’t know where to turn to get help. Staff at the government’s residency office have been instructed to give the number to people passing through its doors. “Now, everyone knows our number, especially the foreign workers,” said Yahya. 

Language barriers remain an issue, however. “The biggest problem is we don’t have translators,” said Yahya. Victims have been known to sit in police stations for hours, waiting for someone they can speak to. 

He also hopes to eventually hire social workers and therapists, as well as IT experts to tackle the problem of trafficking on social media. 

In less than half a year, the Erbil directorate has received a total of 166 cases. The statistician in Yahya (he has a degree in the subject) comes out when he proudly shows the database he created to document every file his office opens. Eleven were confirmed cases of human trafficking of foreign workers. Three involved selling organs. The rest, after being investigated, were largely found to be minor complaints or involved other crimes like theft or persons working illegally in the country. Forty cases have been referred to the court.

The United States downgraded Iraq in its assessment of efforts to combat human trafficking in 2017, putting it on the Tier 2 Watch List after Baghdad failed to rein in militias using child soldiers, punished and deported trafficking victims, and did not report identifying any trafficking victims. 

This year, Iraq stayed on the watch list and was warned it could drop lower still. The US chose to keep Iraq at the same level because the government had a written plan that “if implemented, would constitute significant efforts to meet the minimum standards.” 

Iraq and the Kurdistan Region often criminalized the victim – arresting, imprisoning, and deporting them – the US noted with concern. “Iraqi and KRG officials continued to lack a general understanding of trafficking and ability to recognize trafficking indicators,” stated the report, released a month before the KRG’s directorate to combat human trafficking was opened. The US consulate in Erbil declined to comment for this report. 

The KRG’s efforts to date have focused on developing protections for foreign workers who are victims of human trafficking. SEED, in partnership with the government, recently opened a shelter for trafficking victims – an important step to protect the men and women waiting for their cases to proceed or to leave the country and in the interim are either put up in a hotel at their own or a benefactor’s expense, or are sent back to the very employer who is accused of abuse. After just two weeks, the shelter has eight residents, each with a horrific story. 

While commending such efforts, the Philippines’ Charge d’Affaires Joma T. Sadie warned that victims will not truly be safe until the traffickers are prosecuted under the law. To date, there have been no convictions for trafficking offenses, according to legal experts. 

The Philippines embassy in Baghdad is very active in protecting its nationals from trafficking and coordinating with the federal and regional governments to protect foreign workers. Its diplomatic staff have been working with the KRG’s directorate to combat human trafficking since its inception.

“Private-public partnership has improved,” Sadie said via WhatsApp messaging last week. His office coordinated with SEED over the shelter. But, he added, “stricter implementation” of the anti-trafficking law is needed, fining and jailing the criminals and deporting non-Iraqis involved in the illegal trade.

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