“I Didn’t Come Here to Die”: Migrant Women Trapped in Iraq’s Crossfire
The bombs began just after midnight in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, as Moira* finished folding her employer’s laundry. She lay in the dark in the small bedroom off the kitchen and thought of her baby in Ghana.
The house sits in a sprawl of high-walled villas and guarded compounds that has grown up around the airport and the US consulate during years of relative stability. Now, in the current escalation, it has become one of the most targeted patches of ground in Iraqi Kurdistan, with nightly waves of drones and missiles crossing the region’s airspace.
Moira had not spoken to her baby in months. Her phone was taken at the airport when she arrived. So was her passport. When she asked for them back, she says, her boss beat her until her nose bled.
“I came here leaving my country, my home, my family. I left them behind to work. Now I stay here to earn money for them. But my boss started beating me. They hit my stomach, and then they locked me in the small room, and they started beating me more,” she told More to Her Story.
Moira, 29, from Ghana, is one of tens of thousands of migrant domestic workers across the country. They have traveled thousands of miles from some of the world’s poorest countries to cook, clean and raise other people’s children.
For years, their vulnerability has been an open secret. Not all are physically abused like Moira, but many describe a quieter form of control — long hours, restricted movement and passports held out of reach - conditions that fall short of trafficking in law, but leave them with little real freedom to leave.
Now, as Iran and the United States trade strikes across Iraqi airspace, it has sharpened into something more dangerous: they are stranded, their documents held by employers, unable to flee and often too afraid to speak.
Iraq is the only country to have been struck by both sides in the conflict that began a fortnight ago - caught between Iranian-backed militias launching rockets at American positions and retaliatory US strikes against Tehran-aligned groups. For the migrant workers scattered across its homes, hotels, and compounds, the promise of income has become something harder to escape.
Priya*, 22, arrived from Nepal eight months ago and has not had a day off since. She earns $300 a month and lives in a gated compound a few miles from the airport and the American consulate - close enough that when drones are intercepted overhead, the windows shake. Her face is covered in acne, her hands clasped tightly in her lap. Sitting on the edge of a plastic chair in her boss’s garden, curled tightly into herself, she begins to cry when she talks about her mother.
“At home, there is no one who works except me. My mother is ill. Because of that, no one gave me work in Nepal. That's why I came to this country,” she said.
There is nothing unusual about this. Nepal sends workers abroad on a vast scale, with state oversight. Remittances account for more than a quarter of GDP, according to the World Bank, leaving little incentive for Kathmandu to curb the flow.
When Priya heard the first explosions, she did not know what they were. She had never heard anything like them in her life. Her mother saw the news and has been calling constantly since, frantic with worry.
She continued, through sobs: “My little sister told me that my mother cries about it. She is already sick and people tell her not to worry too much. But she doesn’t listen.” She looked at the floor: “I can't even talk to her on the phone. During the day, I'm busy with work, and they don't let me have my phone. At night, the timing doesn't work — she is already asleep.”
Priya wanted to be a professional football player, but it didn’t make any money. She misses playing football, let alone exercising at all.
In another compound across the city, Mariam* from Côte d'Ivoire has been in Erbil for close to five years. “For four years now, I've been saying that I'm afraid. Even of men - when I see men here, I'm scared. And now, with the bombs, I'm very afraid. It’s even worse,” she told More to Her Story.
Her visa has expired, but her employer kept her working. A lawyer quoted her $2,000 to arrange the documents she would need to leave. She does not have $2,000. She does not have her passport. She cannot leave the compound without her employer.
“If I have the chance to leave, I will leave, but I don't know how,” Mariam said. “If my family knew what was happening here, my mother might collapse or even die from the shock. So I don't tell them anything. I tell them everything is fine.”
Migrant workers are increasingly caught in the fallout of modern conflict. In the Gulf, among fourteen civilians killed since the Iran-US conflict began, eight of them were foreign nationals from Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and India.
In other conflicts, such as in Israel, Thai farm workers were among the largest group of foreign victims in the Hamas attacks of October 2023; Filipino and Nepali workers were also killed or taken hostage. In Ukraine, dozens of Ghanaians and other nationals have been killed after being lured into the conflict zone with promises of civilian work.
Colonel Sardar, director of the Office for Combating Organised Crime in Erbil, sat in his office on what was technically his day off - though, he said, there are no real days off during a war - and described to More To Her Story an operation that has been working to untangle exploitation from the labour system since 2016.
He said his office has interviewed 1,610 foreign labourers this year, identified 207 victims of human trafficking and returned 112 home. Ninety-three recruitment companies have been shut down since 2018.
Passport confiscation, he said, is a crime under Iraqi law. But it is also almost universal.
“All victims of human trafficking… the first thing they talked about was confiscated passports,” he said. “We have a lot of cases.”
He said employers are afraid workers will disappear and described “three Indian workers” who stole “two kilograms of gold” from a household and were caught only at the airport.
“If the passport is with the family, they cannot steal from them,” he explained. The loophole, in any case, is vast: individual employers cannot legally hold passports, but recruitment companies can - as can his own directorate. Either way, the document remains out of the worker’s hands.
A new agreement with Turkey, signed two weeks ago, now allows workers trapped in Iraq to transit out on temporary visas processed within a week due to Iraqi airspace being closed. The colonel said the process was moving. For women without documents, without money and without their employers' knowledge that they want to leave, it remains somewhat theoretical.
Amara*, 27, from Ghana, has a six-year-old son she thinks about every day. She earns $250 a month on a three-year contract. Before she came, she was a seamstress who wanted to see the world. She had never heard a bomb before.
“I felt like I was going to die,” she said, of the night the missiles came closest. The bed shook. She lay very still and prayed. "I said, God, please help me. I didn't come here to die." Her house, like the others, sits in the shadow of the airport and the consulate - the geography that makes these neighbourhoods desirable and, now, dangerous. The families who employ these women chose these streets for their security and their status. The women inside their walls had no choice at all.
“I would go home if the bombing became very bad, but for now it is okay,” Amara said.
For now, it is okay. That is what all of them are holding onto: the present tense, the money, and the knowledge that somewhere far away, the people they came here for are still waiting.
*Names have been changed for security reasons.
Additional reporting by Haana Babashekh