War Taking Toll on Marriage, Too

"Think of college, when I chose you from among all the students," the husband reminded her softly. "I can balance you and my family. I will."

After a tearful, and perhaps only temporary, reconciliation, the case was called off and the two shared a taxi home. "That is a good ending," Moussawi said, smiling.

Before taking his current post, Moussawi sat on Iraq's main criminal court, a job he found less troubling.

"Signing death sentences is easier than signing divorce orders," Moussawi said during a recess in his spartan courtroom. "In executions, it is just a single person punished for maybe a single crime. In divorce, you are collapsing and destroying a whole family and a whole society, because family is the nucleus of society."

As a last-ditch effort to save a marriage, Moussawi said, he often sends couples to meet with Sundis Ghazi Hassan Habash. A social worker assigned to the Kadhimiyah court, Habash said she has seen and heard all of the "excuses" for divorce. She accepts some: physical abuse (which she says is on the rise), adultery or the taking of a second wife -- Iraqi men are allowed up to four -- without permission from the first one.

But she has little time for squabbles over money, quarrels with each other's relatives or what she calls "tiny problems," like bed-wetting, an issue in a recent case.

The husband "complained to the judge that he had to change the mattress every morning," Habash said. "When the judge said this is no reason for divorce, he cursed him. Really, now they want to divorce over anything."

Habash, a trained psychologist who works in a crowded conference room adjacent to Moussawi's chambers, said her main strategy to thwart divorce is to "threaten them and make them afraid of the future."

"I tell the wives no one can care for them and their children as well as their husbands can," she said. "I make the husbands think of their kids so they can see how miserable they will be without them. Sometimes they even cry."

One recent afternoon, she counseled a young couple through what she called "a particularly sensitive problem."

"He wants her to do sexual things not approved by our Muslim and Arab society," she said, declining to explain further. Lawyers said that because women are forbidden to discuss such issues, they turn an empty cup upside down on a table when appearing before a judge, a sign understood to mean they have been subjected to illicit acts.

"If this doesn't stop, the marriage should stop right away," Habash said she told the couple.

Family court officials said that while some aspects of Iraqi society have grown more conservative in recent years, women have been empowered to end marriages that they previously would have been required to endure. Saed Chokhchi, 70, a lawyer at the family court, said that five years ago he worked on one or two divorce cases a month. Now, they take up his entire caseload.

"The way society looks at divorced women is changing. It used to be something disgraceful, but it has become something ordinary," he said. "You have TV and radio promoting independence."

But his colleague, Sara al-Tammimi, 24, said the law was still stacked against female plaintiffs.

While men can bring divorce proceedings for any reason, women can divorce only under certain conditions, such as physical or sexual abuse or abandonment. Absent such mistreatment, a woman can divorce only if her husband consents, and in such cases she forfeits legal benefits such as compensation for the three-month post-divorce period in which remarrying is prohibited.

Since finishing law school a year ago, Tammimi, who is unmarried, said she has handled at least 75 divorces. "It can be depressing," she said. "But I am hoping to get experience from all these cases, so I can do marriage 100 percent right."

Special correspondent Saad al-Izzi contributed to this report.