Sitting at a table in a kitchen in Mosul, Iraqi Abir Jassem prepares stuffed vegetables. Financial security, this widow and mother of three children has finally found it, thanks to a catering service managed exclusively by women.
Founded in 2017, when Mosul was liberated from the jihadists of the Islamic State (IS) group, the small company “Taste of Mosul” today has around thirty employees, cooks but also two delivery girls, most of them widows or divorced.
In a largely conservative and patriarchal society, the initiative represents a lifeline for residents of the northern Iraqi metropolis, where the devastating war against jihadists has deprived thousands of women of their husbands.
“If I didn’t work, we wouldn’t be able to eat or drink,” summarizes Ms. Jassem, 37.
Her husband died of hepatitis when the city was still in the hands of ISIS. Once Mosul was liberated, her family refused to let her work in a mixed space.
“But I wanted to work, so as not to depend on anyone,” she insists.
Today, she earns more than ten dollars (around nine euros) a day cooking meals delivered to customers. His specialty: the famous Mosul kebbeh, a dish made from minced meat.
Certain dishes of “Mossouli gastronomy (…), neither the Syrians nor the Lebanese can prepare them”, she boasts, a small dig aimed at her culinary rivals.
Next to her, several women prepare the day’s menu around a large blue table. A cook rolls vine leaves, another stuffs hollowed-out peppers copiously with orange rice, while a third prepares triangular fritters with minced meat.
In Iraq, of the “13 million women of working age”, only one million have a job, indicated the International Labor Organization (ILO) in a July 2022 report.
Hence their “low” labor market participation rate, capping at 10.6%.
And in Mosul, at the end of the war in the summer of 2017, “war widows” numbered in the thousands, estimated at the time an article published by the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR).
These husbands “were often the sole breadwinner of the family”, recalled the institution, specifying that widows, “without income and often with children to raise, are among the most vulnerable people”.
It is in this context that Mahiya Youssef, 58, launched “Taste of Mosul”, to allow “women to enter the job market”, in a destroyed city with an economy in tatters.
“Let’s be realistic. If even graduates are unemployed, I asked myself what job can suit the Mosul woman, in order to provide for her children and be a strong woman?” she explains.
Launched with two cooks, the project now brings together more than 30 employees, mainly women deprived of their husbands or who have divorced, but also young graduates, explains the mother of five children who is married.
With starters and dishes priced between one and ten dollars, monthly profits exceed $3,000 (around 2,800 euros), she says.
She hopes to open a restaurant, and why not, replicate the experience in other regions. Its asset: “old gastronomy, which is not cooked in restaurants”, underlines Ms Youssef.
She cites Hindiya, a zucchini stew with pepper sauce simmering with kebbeh, but also Ouroug, fried balls made from flour, meat and vegetables.
Widowed and mother of two children, Makarem Abdel Rahmane says she lost her husband in 2004, kidnapped by Al-Qaeda jihadists. At the wheel of her car, the fifty-year-old has become a delivery driver. Enough to cause many raised eyebrows.
“My children support me, but some relatives are opposed” to this activity, she admits. “Criticisms” that she ignores: with her work, she found a “second home”.
There are especially loyal customers, like Taha Ghanem. For more than two years, he has ordered his lunch from “Goût de Mosul”, two to three times a week.
“Because of work, we are far from home. We may miss home cooking. But now we have this service,” rejoices the 28-year-old cafe owner, praising the “unique flavors” of the gastronomy of this Iraqi city.
23/09/2023 16:33:18 – Mossoul (Iraq) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
