Um Ahmad, as she was known to the girls, had it all planned out. From Baghdad to the border and on to Damascus and a new life, Mona and her three Iraqi friends didn't need to worry about a thing. For the year-old eldest daughter of eight children whose parents faced a daily despair of car bombs and poverty in their Baghdad slum, the offer sounded too good to be true.
Within a week of arriving in Damascus, Mona - whose name has been changed to protect her identity - had been plied with alcohol by Um Ahmad, required to dance for "friends of the factory owner" and had lost her virginity. Unable to return to her family due to the perceived shame she had brought upon them, Mona began her new life in Syria as a prostitute working for Um Ahmad, dancing in bars outside Damascus and having sex with clients.
As pressure mounts on President George Bush to announce a significant change of direction to the disastrous military occupation of Iraq, the stories of Mona and others like her are a sobering reminder of the consequences of the other Iraq that war has created: a place away from bombs and beheadings, but where the daily struggle for existence is still desperate, and where young lives continue to be torn apart.
Mona had become another victim of the growing sex trade among an Iraqi refugee community in Syria that local NGOs now estimate at , people, and to whose plight aid agencies say the international community continues to turn a blind eye. Laurens Jolles, acting representative for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees UNHCR in Damascus, told the Guardian that international donor funds for the agency's Iraq programme have been drastically reduced for , roughly halving an office budget he said was already "totally insufficient to provide tangible results".
Two years on, that situation has changed and many refugees are no longer able to look after themselves," said Mr Jolles. Without providing sufficient resources to help host governments contain the refugee population there will be a secondary displacement of refugees to Europe.
