[Editor’s note: This investigation has been nominated for the 2020 Samir Kassir Award for Freedom of the Press. It was originally published in Arabic on 16 May, 2019. The reporting was carried out  with the support of the Network of Iraqi Reporters for Investigative Journalism (NIRIJ), under the supervision of Kami al-Melhem.]   13-year-old Hibatullah stood in a long queue with a group of women…

In Arabic, we differentiate between taghyeer (تغيير) and taghayur (تغيّر). Both words mean change. But taghyeer connotes planned action, executed unilaterally by a powerful elite, with a pre-known end result; whereas taghayur implies an open- ended, multitudinous process that could be influenced by organized social agents. Taghyeer is engineered according to a pre-determined ideal, already complete before its application, while it is this ideal which…