“Yemen, where FGM levels in some regions are known to reach 50 percent, is another example where progress is being made. A January 2001 ministerial decree banning FGM, combined with government and NGO concentration on the worst-affected areas, have, in the words of Jordan-based UNICEF communication officer Wolfgang Friedl, “considerably reduced the frequency of the practise in the space of only a few years.”
Further north in the Middle East, the record is considerably more patchy. Hampered by its policy of following up on an issue only if the local authorities themselves consider it important enough to investigate, the UN’s statistics on FGM peter out on the Egyptian-Israeli border.
Yet FGM is known to be practised throughout the Arabian peninsular, particularly in northern Saudi Arabia, as well as in southern Jordan and Iraq. A recent survey by the German NGO WADI, based in the Iraqi Kurdish city of Sulaymaniyah, showed well over 60 percent of women in the rural area of Germian, about 150 km southwest of city, had been circumcised.
There is also circumstantial evidence to suggest that FGM is present in Syria. Then, of course, there is Iran. Given the frequency of the phenomenon in the tribal areas of Iraqi Kurdistan immediately adjoining the Iranian border, and the population's close familial and cultural links to the Kurds further east, it is only logical to assume FGM exists there too.”
http://www.irinnews.org/InDepthMain.aspx?InDepthId=15&ReportId=62474&Country=Yes
This subject came up a few years ago, and there were then, as now, certain peculiar people who, for reasons probably best kept private, went out of their way to try to exonerate moslems from this cultural atrocity. Back then the moslem apologists tried to say it was "only the Africans" who did this. Guess the Kurds live in Africa now.
Go figure.