Iraqi Refugee Stories: 'Mirah,' Age 27

"My life is being wasted here"

"Mirah" in front of the White House, November 2003.

Mirah is a twenty-seven-year-old woman from a small city in the south of Iraq called Kut. When the United States occupied Iraq in 2003, she was working on a degree in English at her local university. As a young woman from an area where Iraq's tribes are strong, she says she lived a closed life, spending all her time either at home or in school, and unable to stand up to the men in her family when she disagreed with them. In May 2003, Mirah met an American lawyer named Fern Holland. Holland encouraged the women at Mirah's university to form a volunteer group to work on women's rights. Mirah was inspired by her words and helped start the organization. She also began working for the Coalition Provisional Authority and wrote a weekly column for Iraqi newspapers on women's issues. In November 2003, in recognition of her work, she was invited to visit the United States as part of a delegation of Iraqi women that met with President Bush at the White House.

But advocating for women's rights in Iraq quickly became dangerous. On March 9, 2004, Mirah's American mentor, Fern Holland, was gunned down in her car, one of the first U.S. civilian casualties in Iraq. The next month, the Medhi Army attacked the CPA building in Kut where Mirah worked. She fled the building, under fire, and was told by Mehdi army officers that she would be killed. After two weeks in hiding at home, she returned to her work. For the next year and a half, Mirah attempted to continue her work for women's rights in Kut. She received two death threats from the Iraqi political party the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution, and was forced to spend time hiding in Baghdad and in Jordan. Determined to resume her work on women's rights, she returned to Kut in on April 12, 2005. She found the office of the women's association ransacked and the refrigerator riddled with bullets. Mirah closed the organization and fled again to Jordan, where she is currently a refugee.

When Mirah visited the Ministry of Intelligence to ask for legal residence in Jordan, she was informed she had three days to leave the country. Without her legal residence card, Mirah has struggled to find work and is barely surviving in Jordan, but she has continued to be a strong supporter of human rights. With the help of a team of British filmmakers, Mirah has started a program that collects donations from abroad to help send Iraqi children to school. She fears deportation and has attempted to leave Jordan for a safer country, so far without luck. She told Human Rights First "I would like to study. If I came to the United States, I would try to get a master's degree. Here, life is so horrible. My life is being wasted."