Sometimes when the pain hits, Agnes* has to pause for several seconds to ride out the excruciating wave. It feels like someone has tied a rope to her insides and is pulling and twisting it, the 27-year-old Nigerian domestic worker says, making it hard to bend or stand up straight.

Agnes’s ordeal started in March in the Iraqi city of Basra when her boss raped her at gunpoint. She fell pregnant, and the man then forced her to undergo a painful abortion. It was so difficult, Agnes said, that she could not sit for three days. Since then, the severe abdominal pains won’t go away, and there’s no one to take her to a hospital.

“I just want to go home and treat myself, but I can’t do that,” Agnes said on a phone call from Basra, where she is holed up in a hostel belonging to the recruiting firm that hired her from Nigeria last year. “The man has refused to pay my salary. I don’t know if I am pregnant, but I have not seen my menstruation since then. I just want to go home and check myself and see what’s happening inside me,” she added, her voice breaking.

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Al Jazeera is not mentioning Agnes’s real name because she fears reprisals from the staff of the so-called recruiting agency. She is one of hundreds, if not thousands, of people who are caught in a transnational labour network that often sees women from Nigeria and other African countries deceived into domestic servitude in Iraqi cities, activists said.

In Nigeria, the women are hired by a ring of local “agents” who sell them a dream of good pay and good conditions abroad. They get the women to agree, process visas and send them off to recruitment firms in Iraq for a commission of about $500 per woman, according to activists familiar with the system.

Once there, the Iraqi firms ask the women, called “shagalas” (meaning “house worker” in Arabic), to sign two-year contracts and assign them to families or labour-intensive institutions like spas, where they are often expected to work more than 20 hours a day for monthly pay of $200 to $250. In many homes, the women are subject to inhumane treatment: They go days without food, are beaten and are not provided living quarters.

Some, like Agnes, also face sexual abuse and rape. Several women told Al Jazeera stories of victims who had faced so much abuse and torture that they ended up dead although these cases have not been independently confirmed.

“It’s a form of modern slavery,” said Damilola Adekola, co-founder of Hopes Haven Foundation, a Nigerian NGO that helps track women in Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries where abuse of African domestic workers is rife. “These Iraqi agents and the families [the women work for] often tell them, ‘We’ve bought you, so you have to work.’ The contracts they sign go against any type of international law because there’s no medical care and they have to work obscene hours.”

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These women often lack knowledge of what a normal workplace should be like because the Nigerian recruiters target women from rural communities who are usually uninformed about the dangers, Adekola added. Although some have diplomas, they often don’t know about the realities of post-war Iraq or that Baghdad is not a country. “Once they hear they can get on an airplane, they just jump at the opportunity,” he said.

Stella Orji, centre, speaks out against violence, trafficking and child abuse as rights activists under the umbrella of the Justice Development and Peace Commission hold a protest march in Lagos, Nigeria [File: Pius Utomi Ekpei/AFP]

A chance to ‘hustle’ abroad goes badly

A native of Nigeria’s Ekiti, a small state northeast of the commercial capital, Lagos, Agnes was working as a domestic worker at home when she heard of an opportunity that could take her abroad.

She paid 100,000 naira ($64) to a local recruiting agent, a family friend whom she trusted, believing that she would be able to make much more money to send home to her ailing mother and nine-year-old son.

Soaring inflation in Nigeria has crippled the naira since 2019. The result has been that Nigerians, young and old, are leaving the country to seek better opportunities. According to an Afrobarometer report this month, more than half of the 200 million population indicated they want to leave the country due to economic hardship with most looking at Europe, North America and the Middle East.

For Agnes, domestic work anywhere else and with the promise of pay that was three times what she normally earned, was an answered prayer. She left for Basra from Lagos airport in September 2023 and arrived at the Iraqi recruitment firm she had been “sold” to after a day’s journey.

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Once in Iraq, Agnes’s dreams of a comfortable life abroad turned into a nightmare. Her first shock was at the recruitment firm in Iraq. The firm assigned her a first home to work at, but Agnes was badly treated. She wasn’t given food regularly although her boss would force her to work all day, and her phone was seized, she said. When she complained and refused to work, the Iraqi man returned her to the agents, demanding a refund. Angered that she’d caused a loss, two employers from the firm descended on Agnes, she said, hitting her, punching her and smashing her mobile.

“I had to use a bandage on my eye for three days,” Agnes said. In a photo taken days after the beating and seen by Al Jazeera, Agnes’s right cheek is red and swollen. The firm then forced her to go to a second home, which is where she said the rape took place.

Now, Agnes is back in the firm’s hostel, penniless. After the pains in her abdomen rendered her unable to work, she said the boss who raped her abandoned her there and refused to pay six months of her salary.

“If I knew what this country is like, I wouldn’t have come here. If I knew it’s not safe and there is no respect for life, I wouldn’t have come. I just thought I could also come here and hustle. Please help me get out of here,” she pleaded.

Although she has a place to sleep and she, as well as dozens of women at the hostel, get some noodles and rice daily to cook, Agnes is fearful. The agency has refused to send her back to Nigeria, insisting that she has one more year to work on her contract, despite her debilitating pain.

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Agnes said she tries not to aggravate staff of the firm to avoid beatings. Several women there have either been beaten or have been locked up for days without food because their bosses complained of their conduct, she said. Al Jazeera is not revealing the name of the company in order to protect the women, but we did seek official responses regarding the firm from the Iraqi Ministry of Interior, which is in charge of Iraq’s police. We have not yet received a response.

Trafficking of Africans rife in Middle East

Despite several laws against labour trafficking, the practice is rife in post-war Iraq. The country is both a source and destination country for trafficked victims with an estimated 221,000 people currently in slavery-like conditions, according to a November report from the International Organization of Migration (IOM). Most documented victims are from Iran and Indonesia.

The experiences of African female domestic workers in Iraq are largely undocumented, but the challenges they face have been going on for years. Black people have historically been seen as slaves in the country and still face discrimination today.

In 2011, news reports documented how dozens of Ugandan women were tricked by local agents into believing they would be working on United States army bases when the country was under American occupation after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s government. Instead, the women were “sold” to Iraqi firms for about $3,500 and forced to work in dire conditions. Eventually, some escaped with the help of US army staff, but others were never accounted for.

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Similar cases of exploitation are being reported across the Middle East, where hundreds of thousands of migrant workers from African and Asian countries are at higher risk of trafficking, according to the IOM.

Under the “kafala” system, which is legal in countries like Lebanon, employers pay for the documentation and travel costs of the foreign workers and use that as leverage to abuse them by confiscating their passports or seizing their pay, reports have shown. The system doesn’t give the worker the right to seek out another employer but does allow employers to transfer contracts to others. Recruitment agencies often use the legal system to employ many workers and then auction the contracts online for huge amounts of money.

Migrant domestic workers protest in the Lebanese capital, Beirut, to call for the abolishment of the sponsorship kafala system and for the inclusion of domestic workers in Lebanese labour laws [File: Anwar Amro/AFP]

It’s unclear to what extent Iraqi authorities investigate agents hiring and “selling” African workers or the individuals who maltreat these women. Authorities however appear to be investigating one case that has garnered widespread attention on Nigerian social media.

Eniola, 28, had, like her counterparts, jumped at the opportunity to earn more money abroad as a domestic worker and arrived in Baghdad in February 2023. However, her boss forced her to work most of the day and allowed her only three to four hours of sleep. When she complained, the woman routinely tortured her with tasers or hit her with an iron rod. She doused her with hot tea or water on several occasions too.

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In videos Eniola sent to Al Jazeera, her fingers, which appear to be broken, are bandaged, and scars from burns and wounds dot her body. She found the courage to finally escape in August after more than a year of abuse. Al Jazeera is only using Eniola’s first name to protect her identity.

“She had just beat me when she put some water on the fire and told me to enter the bathroom,” Eniola told Al Jazeera. She feared her boss wanted to pour hot water on her, so she fled. “I don’t know where I got the courage, but I ran outside.”

Bleeding, Eniola ran to groups of locals who, shocked by her wounds, helped her get to a police station where she handed herself in. She was never paid by her boss.

In a statement, Iraq’s interior ministry told Al Jazeera it was not aware of the two women’s cases, but vowed to investigate the matter.

An officer at the country’s Directorate for Residence Affairs in charge of residency violations, and where Eniola has been transferred, told Al Jazeera the abusive boss had been “invited by government agencies for questioning and was bieng investigated”.

On Tuesday, Eniola confirmed she was arraigned in court alongside her former boss, and a years’ worth of salary was handed to her. Eniola, only willing to go home, said she declined to press charges against the Iraqi woman. Authorities plan to force the boss to pay for her ticket home, she said, but it’s unclear when that will happen.

There are several other Nigerian women in detention for various offences: fighting with their bosses, overstaying their residence permits or “taking salaries and running away,” said the Iraqi official, who is not authorised to speak to the press.

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Nigerian domestic workers Al Jazeera spoke to however say their Iraqi bosses have been known to take advantage of language barriers and some wrongfully accuse the women of crimes.

Nigeria fails to act quickly, activists say

Activists blamed Nigerian authorities for failing to regulate the industry and allowing groups of women to head to Middle Eastern countries for domestic work without proper documentation or a system to track them. Some reports also accuse staff of the Nigerian Immigration Service (NIS) of taking bribes from local agents and turning a blind eye at airports to clear cases of exploitation.

Al Jazeera put these allegations to the NIS via email. In a statement, the NIS said it would respond to the accusations but did not reply in time for publication.

“Immigration is never a crime, and we are not saying people should not find work abroad, but there should be a government system where these women are registered and taxed, even if it’s a small token,” Adekola of the Hopes Haven Foundation said. The organisation helped alert authorities to Eniola’s and Agnes’s cases.

“With that, the government can monitor the women’s information and work situation. If these employers torturing them know that the ladies are being monitored by their government, they’ll not try what they’re doing to them.”

Officials at the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP), the Nigerian anti-trafficking agency, first sounded the alarm about the exploitative recruitment drives to Iraq in May 2023.

Some rogue agents who take part in recruiting and “selling” the women are known by NAPTIP and are under investigation, an official who had not been authorised to speak to the media and who we are therefore not naming, told Al Jazeera.

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Agnes’s and Eniola’s cases are being investigated, the official said but did not give a timeline as to when the women might be repatriated. Nigeria does not have an embassy in Iraq, and the official said the agency was liaising with the Nigerian consulate in Jordan.

In Basra, Agnes is still holed up in her recruitment agency’s hostel, hoping for a way out. She can hardly stand up from her bed, she said. This week, some women arrived freshly from Nigeria and Uganda, and have been sent to their assigned homes to work, she said. The women, Agnes added, were fearful after seeing her condition but were forced to go.

“I just want to go home because I’m not OK,” she said. “I’m barely alive. Please help me get out. I’m too young to die here.”

*Name changed to protect anonymity