In some parts of Baghdad property prices had dropped by half

In some parts of Baghdad property prices had dropped by half. Well-off people wanted to keep it a secret if they sold a house because kidnappers and robbers would know they had money. “Some 5,000 people were kidnapped between the fall of Saddam Hussein and May 2005,” said the former human rights minister Bakhtiar Amin.The real figure was in fact far higher since most people did not report kidnappings. If Stendhal was looking for the 10 richest Iraqis he would have had to begin his search in Jordan, Syria or Egypt. Waiting outside the College of Sciences in Baghdad one day was a 20-year-old biology student called Mariam Ahmed Yassin, who belonged to a well-off family.

She was expecting a private car, driven by somebody she trusted, to take her home Her fear was kidnapping. She said: “I promised my mother to go nowhere after college except home and never to sit in a restaurant.” Her father, a businessman, had already moved to Germany. Such a tribe will seek vengeance if one of its members is abducted – a much more frightening prospect for kidnappers than any action by the police.The life of women had already become more restricted because of the violence in Baghdad. A friend suffering from a painful toothache spent hours one day ringing up dentists only to be told again and again that they had left the country. She volunteered: “I admire Saddam very much and I consider him a great leader because he could control security.”Mariam’s father was part of the great exodus of business and professional people from Iraq. This is not because of religious scruples on the part of kidnappers but because they thought old-fashioned families were likely to belong to a strong tribe. Those girls who were truly religious concealed all their hair, and these were in a minority.

The others left a quiff of hair showing, which usually meant that they wore headscarves solely because they were frightened of religious zealots.
There was also a belief that kidnappers, the terror of every Iraqi parent, would be less likely to abduct a girl wearing a headscarf because they would suppose she came from a traditional family. About three quarters of the girls leaving their schools at lunchtime in central Baghdad now wore headscarves The reason was generally self-protection. These were eroded in the final years of Saddam Hussein as Iraqi society became increasingly Islamic. But under the constitution negotiated with the participation of the American and British ambassadors and ratified by the referendum on 15 October 2005, women legally became second-class citizens in much of Iraq.