Foreign wives and widows face conveyor-belt justice in Iraqi courts after the defeat of Islamic State

The woman in a pink prison uniform greeted the judge in a lilting Caribbean English that took him by surprise.

“Did you enter Iraq illegally?” Judge Suhail Abdullah replied, somewhat brusquely, in Arabic. “And do you believe in the ideology of the Islamic State?”

Standing in the dock at Baghdad’s Central Criminal Court, Anisa Waheed Mohammed, 53, from Trinidad and Tobago, answered yes to the first question and no to the second, fearing any other combination would instantly condemn her.

“I had watched Isil videos with my husband and two daughters and we decided we wanted to go and be part of an Islamic society,” she said. “I did not know it was a warzone. When we arrived, all we saw was Iraqis…

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