ERBIL, Kurdistan Region —The kidnap and rape of an Iranian woman by an Erbil taxi driver earlier this month has once more laid bare the threat to women’s safety in Erbil, where reports of rape and sexual assault by taxi drivers continue to accumulate and measures to combat sexual harassment have failed to materialise.
The assault took place in the early hours of September 16, when 30-year-old Shirin* hailed a taxi to take her to the bus station. She was due to catch a bus back to Iran later that day.
"My residence permit expired, so on September 16, I wanted to return to Iran and then come back to the Kurdistan Region [to renew it]. It was at 4:40 am at dawn when I took a taxi and asked him [the driver] to take me to the terminal,” she recounted to Rudaw on Monday.
“When the driver knew I was from Iran, he spoke to me in Farsi and said, 'you are a beautiful girl,' and I ignored him. I felt the car speed up and I began to fear that he had bad intentions.”
"He drove me down the wrong road, and I warned him that this was not the way to the terminal, but he said 'I want to take you there through a shortcut’,” she went on to recall.
“I eventually ended up in a deserted area. He stopped the car, pulled out a pistol and said, 'I will kill you if you utter a word.' He began to rape me."
Mehnaz*, a friend of Shirin’s, had spent time with her the night before the incident. She received a phone call from her distraught friend on the day of the attack.
“She called me that morning. I heard her crying. I thought someone might have died,” Mehnaz recalled. “But I realized she had been kidnapped when I heard a man's voice cursing her while raping her.”
“I heard her begging him to leave her alone … I just did not know what to do."
Mehnaz rushed to a market near her apartment, where people advised her to call the Asayesh (Kurdish internal security forces). Their response lacked the urgency she needed.
“They responded saying we should call them back at 9 am, but I said her life is in danger and she might get killed.”
The interaction with the Asayesh left Mehnaz still feeling helpless.
"I could not control myself and just did not know where I could go to help her.”
Shirin called Mehnaz back about 30 minutes later, abandoned in an area she did not recognize and asking for her help.
“While we were speaking, a motorcycle happened to pass by her. She asked him about their location, and he said it was the industrial area of Mamzawa [south of Erbil]."
After learning of Shirin’s location, Mehnaz rushed to her friend to find her crying inconsolably on a street corner.
"We took her back and drove to the Asayesh. They began their investigations and later informed us that they had discovered the identity of the taxi driver and his car plate number."
Though the rapist was identified almost immediately, a police official told Rudaw he remains at large.
"We have begun our investigation into the incident and have issued an arrest warrant for the suspect," said Erbil Police spokesman Hogir Aziz.
Rudaw English asked the spokesman for more information on the suspect, who refrained from providing any further details.
Tough laws, lax enforcement
Social activist and legal expert Shwan Sabir described the attack on Shirin as a “catastrophe.”
"Neither legal bodies nor human rights groups should be silent," Sabir said.
"According to active Iraqi and Kurdistan Region laws, the attacker’s sentence must be very tough, to the point of execution [death penalty] if he is found guilty to have raped her, kidnapped her, and to have used weapons,” he added.
With some Erbil residents driving taxis as a supplementary means of income, it is possible that the perpetrator’s main occupation is as a civil servant, affecting the sentencing they could receive if found guilty.
“If he is a government employee, the verdict could be much tougher," Sabir explained.
While laws regarding rape are tough on paper, enforcement is known to be lax, to the degree that rape survivors often refrain from taking their case to the police.
Reports of sexual assaults by taxi drivers appeared to be taken seriously by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) earlier this year when measures to combat harassment were introduced by the Ministry of Interior.
All taxi drivers were to register with the Transport Labourers Syndicate and obtain security authorization, according to regulations introduced in January.
Taxi drivers were to display two cards in their vehicles; one providing their personal information, including a photograph, and a second listing the emergency phone numbers of security forces and the directorate for combatting violence against women.
Implementation of these rules was supposed to take place by June 1, or taxi drivers would risk having their cars confiscated by the police. However, a ride in any Erbil taxi today makes all too clear that the measures have failed to materialize.
Speaking to Rudaw English on Thursday, Kurdo Omer, head of the Combating Violence Against Women Directorate at the KRG, warned of the prevalence of cases like Shirin’s.
"Unfortunately, this phenomenon is on the rise. It is the duty of media to raise awareness about this dangerous trend … it is not just in taxis, but also in buses shuttling students to and from school that female students are sometimes sexually harassed."
Omer said she has continued to press for “tougher measures” to be implemented, urging the Interior and Transport Ministries to enforce a regulation that asks taxi drivers to “stick the 119 hotline onto backseat of their vehicles, in addition to their full name and address. So in cases of sexual assault, the victim could immediately call us for help."
Established by telecommunication companies Korek and Asiacell in partnership with the Ministry of Interior, 119 is a free, fully confidential 24-hour hotline, where trained operators “provide counseling, advice, and support to gender-based violence, survivors and vulnerable individuals,” Omer explained.
*Having spoken to Rudaw on the condition of anonymity, the survivor of the attack and her friend were respectively given the names Shirin and Mehnaz.
Translation and additional reporting by Zhelwan Z. Wali
