Um Rami says her family was left "penniless" when her husband disappeared in 2007 during the United States occupation of Iraq, reports Trend referring to Reuters.
"When he disappeared, we went through torture, all kinds of torture," the Baghdad resident told the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) in a video marking the International Day of the Disappeared, commemorated globally on Friday.
"All the responsibilities fell on my shoulders. I take care of the family, their lives, and their education."
Iraq has been ravaged by decades of near-ongoing conflict and reports of missing persons are numerous. The ICMP has estimated that the number of missing people in the country could range from 250,000 to one million.
On Thursday, the prime minister's office and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) held a joint event in Baghdad to mark the international day of those missing.
"Iraqis have suffered for too long from the successive armed conflicts, the oppressive practices of the former regime, from years of violence after 2003 and from the terrorist crimes committed by Daesh," the office of Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi said in a statement, using the Arabic acronym for ISIL, an armed group that at its peak in January 2015 held an area across Iraq and Syria roughly equivalent to the size of the UK.
"Too many lives have been lost, and countless families remain without news about their missing relatives", it added.
The head of the ICRC delegation in Iraq, Katharina Ritz, told Al Jazeera on Friday that the event in the capital was held to "show the importance of the missing person issue and political commitment" in resolving it.
Ritz said the ICRC was working closely with government ministries, the judiciary and specialised forensic institutions to address the issue of the fate of the missing persons.
"We recommend to reinforce the effort with a purely humanitarian mechanism, such as a national commission, that brings together the existing expertise and can lead the search for the missing, support to families and prevent future disappearances," she added.
Alice Walpole, the United Nations deputy special representative for Iraq, also addressedthe event.
"For many families whose loved ones are missing, presumed killed, the truth is the only recompense we can offer them," she said.
Walpole praised a draft bill currently being debated in the Iraqi parliament addressing enforced disappearences and urged the government to improve its efforts to investigate cases of disappeared persons and prosecute those responsible.
"It is, at the very least, what the families and communities of the disappeared deserve," she said.