"They just cut off a little bit,"

"I would not eat food from the hands of someone who did not have the procedure,"

When asked if she would have her 10-month-old granddaughter Saya circumcised,
Kitab said "Of course" and explained that the procedure is painless,
"They just cut off a little bit,"

Those are the words of Hurmet Kitab, an elderly Iraqi woman who lives in a part of the country where female circumcision is reported to be at 62%. For Kurdish women, this is not something new. Although it had been going on for decades, and was suspected as such, it wasn't until 2005 that a German aid group confirmed suspicions when they presented their findings publicly for the first time.

What's even more disturbing, as this story recounts, is how a mother tricks her 7 year old daughter with a promise of a party, and the kid finds herself being terrorized.

Sheelan Anwar Omer, a shy 7-year-old Kurdish girl, bounded into her neighbor's house with an ear-to-ear smile, looking for the party her mother had promised.

There was no celebration. Instead, a local woman quickly locked a rusty red door behind Sheelan, who looked bewildered when her mother ordered the girl to remove her underpants. Sheelan began to whimper, then tremble, while the women pushed apart her legs and a midwife raised a stainless-steel razor blade in the air. "I do this in the name of Allah!" she intoned.

As the midwife sliced off part of Sheelan's genitals, the girl let out a high-pitched wail heard throughout the neighborhood. As she carried the sobbing child back home, Sheelan's mother smiled with pride.

Horrible, and the fact that they do this to children as young as 3 is just.... It's a long interesting story, which looks at the role the politicians are playing in all this, along with other fascinating tidbits, like the sheer ignorance displayed by poor little Sheelan's mother when she claims she doesn't know why this is done, only that it won't stop because Islam requires it. However, others claim Islam says nothing about female circumcision.