Aid agencies estimate that thousands of Iraqi parents do not send their daughters to school for cultural reasons and because of the general insecurity in the country. As a result of two decades of war and economic hardship, Iraqi schools have fallen into disrepair, enrolment has dropped, and literacy levels have stagnated, agencies say.
In the south of the country, where infrastructure is more deteriorated due to years of neglect, the situation is worse.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) estimates literacy rates to be less than 60 percent, or 6 million illiterate Iraqi adults. People in rural areas and women are worst off. Only 37 percent of rural women can read, and only 30 percent of Iraqi girls of high school age are enrolled in school, compared with 42 percent of boys.
Alia'a Haydar, 15, resident of the city of al-Samawah, some 240km south of the capital, dreams of the day when she will be able to read magazine articles on the latest fashion and music and also read the Quran, the holy Muslim book.
"I don't know how to read or write my name. My family says that girls should not study as their destiny is to marry and raise children. They say women that study and read in the end turn out to be prostitutes," Alia'a said.
"I know this thinking is wrong but I fear my father. One day, he saw me trying to write on a piece of paper and he punished me for a week. Now, he is looking for a husband for me so that he won’t risk losing his daughter to a school.
"To make the situation of girls in our community worse, in the rural areas where I was living before there weren't schools. Now that we have come to the city, the only one near my home is seven kilometres away. For a girl who is not even allowed to go to the street corner alone, how could go I go to school alone?
"I want to go to school and learn how to write but I don't know what to do. Male mentality in Iraq is very old-fashioned. They see women as their servants with no brains to think and they are afraid of losing their power over us.
"One day I will be able to read, even if I have to run away. The risk of being killed if I do that is the same as working like a donkey in my home, getting beatings from my family for not doing housework properly or living the rest of my life with an illiterate man and not being able to write my own name."
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This article was produced by IRIN News while it was part of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Please send queries on copyright or liability to the UN. For more information: https://shop.un.org/rights-permissions
