Ten years ago, I started interviewing women and girls who had escaped ISIS captivity. From 2014 to 2017, that terrorist organization swept through northern Iraq, tore girls and women from their families, took them to the Caliphate, and forcibly married all those who were nine or older. Under the group’s perverse laws, all this was deemed legal—including subjecting a minor to sexual assault. In fact, the ISIS fighters insisted they were performing God’s will.
The Iraqi government is at war with the Islamic State. Yet members of Iraq’s parliament are now pushing a law that parallels ISIS’s practices. The proposed legislation, an amendment to the 1959 Personal Status Law (PSL), would effectively legalize child marriage, endorsing the same brutal patriarchy under which the captives I spoke to had suffered. It would betray their courage and be a profound step backward for the rights and dignity of Iraqi girls.
When the leftist nationalist leader Abdul-Karim Qasim passed the PSL, it was considered among the most progressive civic codes in the Arab world. The law was designed to grant equal rights to all Iraqis, regardless of sect, and to set a universal standard for matters of marriage, divorce, and inheritance—for instance by requiring that marriages be officiated in state courts. The legal age for marriage was set at eighteen, or fifteen with special judicial approval.
Last month the Iraqi parliament completed its first reading of the proposed amendment, which is set for two more readings and a debate before a final vote. If passed, it would allow couples entering marriage to choose between the PSL’s provisions or those of Islamic schools of jurisprudence (Sharia), some of which allow child marriage and polygamy. These rulings are not standardized; interpretations vary widely among sects. For instance, the Jaafari school, followed by many Shia Muslims, permits girls as young as nine and boys as young as fifteen to be married.
The proposed legislation creates a parallel system of governance, giving religious authorities power over personal affairs that were previously under state regulation. Moreover, it requires the Scholar Council of the Shia Endowment Office and the Fatwa Council of the Sunni Endowment Office to draft a “code of Sharia rulings on personal status matters” no more than six months after the law comes into force. This process would bypass parliamentary and public review.
The draft has other troubling provisions. If the spouses belong to different sects, the husband will determine which Sharia applies. This will likely deepen sectarian divides between the Shia Muslim majority and minority groups, including Sunnis, Kurds, and non-Muslims. The amendment would also legitimize unregistered marriages, which are conducted by religious leaders but not recorded in court. A recent Human Rights Watch report notes that such marriages “function as a loophole around legal restrictions on child marriage” and corrode “women and girls’ ability to get government services and social services linked to their civil status, obtain birth certificates for their children, or claim their rights to dowry, spousal maintenance, and inheritance.”
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The prospect of legalizing child marriage is a symptom of a deeper malaise in contemporary Iraq: it would be a victory for a worldview that prioritizes tradition over progress, control over empowerment, and silence over expression. Even before the present legislation was proposed, the country was facing a growing child marriage crisis. According to UNICEF, more than 28 percent of Iraqi women are married before the age of eighteen. That figure has been rising steadily since the American-led invasion in 2003, when conservative parties won office and religious authorities came to play a prominent part in political life, often attacking civil liberties as western impositions.
Yet it would be simplistic to attribute this push just to clerics. Iraq has long been a battleground for different ideologies. Politicians in the governing Shia Coordination Framework (CF) view legalizing child marriage as a way to appeal to more traditional and rural communities, for whom religion is central to identity. Faris Kamal Nadhmi, a professor of psychology at Salahaddin University in Erbil, noted in a social media post that the amendment’s supporters were speciously framing it as a defense of religious freedom, arguing that it would simply allow followers of different sects to manage their personal affairs. They “may argue that the sexual provisions regarding child and minor marriage were not legislated with the intent to enforce them, nor do they encourage or promote such practices,” he wrote. “Instead, they claim these provisions are included solely for the purpose of regulation and to clarify boundaries according to jurisprudential guidelines.”
Many younger and urbanized Iraqis oppose the legislation, seeing it not as a divine mandate but a reflection of patriarchal control over women. For them, this is a top-down law that does not reflect broader societal aspirations. Rights groups and activists have led widespread protests, including outside parliament in Baghdad. A coalition of fifteen female parliamentarians from various parties has united in opposition to the bill. Their efforts, however, face significant challenges.
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The stakes could not be higher. If the law goes through, it would perpetuate cycles of violence and discrimination with devastating effects on the broader fabric of Iraqi society. Legalizing child marriage would have severe knockoff effects on female education and employment levels. Girls who marry early are far more likely to drop out of school. This further shrinks the pool of educated women, reducing female participation in the workforce, politics, and leadership roles. The result would be to further entrench patriarchal norms and reverse hard-won advances toward gender equality.
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Child marriage is a violation not only of human rights but of the very language of childhood. In the life of every child, there is a tender period where one discovers the simple joys of being, where the future feels like a distant adventure. Legalizing child marriage would steal this sanctuary away. A silence settles into the soul of every girl who is married off before her time, ringing with the question of what might have been. The silence is not just theirs; it’s ours too. It’s the silence of a society that would allow a nine-year-old to be forced into the mold of a wife before she’s understood what it means to be a girl.
This is why silence is not an option. We must remember Enheduana, the world’s first known poet, who lived circa 2285 BC in ancient Mesopotamia during a time of political upheaval and religious strife, of power struggles between city-states and conflicts between priests and royals. As the daughter of King Sargon of Akkad, she occupied a privileged position from which she could challenge corruption and tyranny. In Exaltation of Inanna, she enlisted the Sumerian goddess of love, war, and divine retribution in that cause: “But in your hostile land, you revealed your justice.”
To legalize child marriage is to betray the essence of what Enheduana stood for: the power of voice, the sanctity of choice, and the unyielding pursuit of justice. It is a betrayal of a cultural heritage that has long celebrated the strength and wisdom of women. In envisioning a future for Iraq, I see a country where schools are filled with eager minds, where girls have the chance to grow into the women they choose to be. I see a world where the law protects them rather than consigning them to a fate that offers little more than survival. This vision should not be a dream.
