Imagine being forced to clear bombshells from a war-ravaged barren land in Iraq, working a 16-hour shift, with barely any food to survive.

Sahim Salim speaks to two young men from Punjab who managed to make their way back home from Iraq after wily travel agents in India practically sold them for 500 dollars. The men spent almost six horrifying months there and were lucky to somehow buy their freedom back.

T wenty-six-year-old Kanwaljit Singh sits on his charpai [bed] at his home in Khurlapur village, some 70 kilometers away from Jalandhar in Punjab. He has been abused, assaulted and forced to slave in the past seven months. But has lived to tell the tale.

"I have a lot to be thankful about. Never mind the loans I have looming on my head, I am back in one piece. I am happy now," Kanwaljit says.

Till last year, Kanwaljit was a farmer, who tilled his family land. Then he met a friend sometime in December last year, who told him about a travel agent who could send him to Iraq. Kanwaljit met with the travel agent on January 2, 2011 in Jalandhar.

"This man, Bhupinder Singh, told me that I needed to pay him just Rs 1,30,000 to go to Iraq and work for the American military. He told me that I just had to work eight hours a day, with two weekly offs and in return I would be paid $ 600. I mortgaged my land and gave the travel agent all the necessary papers with the money," says Singh.

Within three days, Singh took the ride to Delhi's international airport and was on his way to Baghdad. At Baghdad airport, he met an Iraqi, who took him to a secluded farmhouse, a seven-hour journey from the airport.

"At the time, there were four of us, including two Sikhs. The Iraqi took away our passports. On the way, we stopped at a hair cutting saloon, where a barber forcefully cut the hair of the two Sikhs."

"We were then taken to an isolated 1,500-acre land, with no people or society in sight. Here, there was a small farmhouse, where the four of us were kept. Our so-called supervisor did not know any Hindi or English, so we mostly communicated by sign language," Singh says.