Hidden victims of a brutal conflict: Iraq's women

obmar · Hidden victims of a brutal conflict: Iraq's women

Hidden victims of a brutal conflict: Iraq's women

Abduction, rape and murder are the punishments for any
woman who dares to hold a professional job. A
month-long investigation by The Observer reveals the
terrible reality of life after Saddam

Peter Beaumont in Baghdad
Sunday October 8, 2006
The Observer

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1890260,00.html

They came for Dr Khaula al-Tallal in a white Opel car
after she took a taxi home to the middle class
district of Qadissiya in Iraq's holy city of Najaf.
She worked for the medical committee that examined
patients to assess them for welfare benefit.
Crucially, however, she was a woman in a country where
being a female professional increasingly invites a
death sentence.
As al-Tallal, 50, walked towards her house, one of
three men in the Opel stepped out and raked her with
bullets.

A women's rights campaigner, Umm Salam - a nickname -
knows about the three men in the Opel: they tried to
kill her on 11 December last year. It was a Sunday,
she recalls, and 15 bullets were fired into her own
car as she drove home from teaching at an internet
cafe. A man in civilian clothes got out of the car and
opened fire. Three bullets hit her, one lodging close
to her spinal cord. Her 20-year-old son was hit in the
chest. Umm Salam saw the gun - a police-issue Glock.
She is convinced her would-be assassin works for the
state.

The shootings of al-Tallal and Umm Salam are not
isolated incidents, even in Najaf - a city almost
exclusively Shia and largely insulated from the
sectarian violence of the North. Bodies of young women
have appeared in its dusty lanes and avenues, places
patrolled by packs of dogs where the boundaries bleed
into the desert. It is a favourite place for dumping
murder victims.

Iraqis do not like to talk about it much, but there is
an understanding of what is going on these days. If a
young woman is abducted and murdered without a ransom
demand, she has been kidnapped to be raped. Even those
raped and released are not necessarily safe: the
response of some families to finding that a woman has
been raped has been to kill her.

Iraq's women are living with a fear that is increasing
in line with the numbers dying violently every month.
They die for being a member of the wrong sect and for
helping their fellow women. They die for doing jobs
that the militants have decreed that they cannot do:
for working in hospitals and ministries and
universities. They are murdered, too, because they are
the softest targets for Iraq's criminal gangs.

Iraq's women live in terror of speaking their
opinions; of going out to work; or defying the strict
new prohibitions on dress and behaviour applied across
Iraq by Islamist militants, both Sunni and Shia. They
live in fear of their husbands, too, as women's rights
have been undermined by the country's postwar
constitution that has taken power from the family
courts and given it to clerics.

'Women are being targeted more and more,' said Umm
Salam last week. Her husband was a university
professor who was executed in 1991 under Saddam
Hussein after the Shia uprising. She survived by
running her family farm. When the Americans arrived
she got involved in civic action, teaching illiterate
women how to read and vote, independent from the
influence of their husbands. She helped them fill in
forms for benefits and set up a sewing workshop.

In doing so she put herself at mortal risk. And since
the assassination attempt, like many women in Najaf,
she has found it hard to work. Which is what the men
in the white Opel wanted. To silence the women like
Umm Salam, who is 42.

'It is very difficult for women here. There is a lot
of pressure on our personal freedoms. None of us feels
that we can have an opinion on anything any more. If
she does, she risks being killed.'

It is a story familiar to women across Iraq, betrayed
by the country's new constitution that guaranteed them
a 25 per cent share of membership of the Council of
Representatives. That guarantee has turned instead
into a fig leaf hiding what women activists now call a
'human rights catastrophe for Iraqi women'.

After a month-long investigation, The Observer has
established that in almost every major area of human
rights, women are being seriously discriminated
against, in some cases seeing their conditions return
to those of females in the Middle Ages. In areas such
as the Shia militia stronghold of Sadr City in east
Baghdad, women have been beaten for not wearing socks.
Even the headscarf and juba - the ankle-length, flared
coat that buttons to the collar - are not enough for
the zealots. Some women have been threatened with
death unless they wear the full abbaya, the black,
all-encompassing veil.

Similar reports are emerging from Mosul, where it is
Sunni extremists who are laying down the law, and
Kirkuk. Women from Karbala, Hilla, Basra and
Nassariyah have all told The Observer similar stories.
Of the insidious spread of militia and religious party
control - and how members of those same groups are,
paradoxically, increasingly responsible for the rape
and murder of women outside their sects and
communities.

'There is a member of my organisation, an activist who
is a Christian,' said Yanar Mohammed, head of the
Organisation for Iraqi Women's Freedom, who has had
death threats for her work in protecting women
threatened by domestic violence or 'honour' killings.
'She would have to walk home each day to her
neighbourhood through an area controlled by one of the
Islamic Shia militias, the Jaish al-Mahdi. She does
not wear a veil so she gets abused by these men. About
three weeks ago, one of them starts following her home
saying that he wants a sexual relationship with her.
He tells her what he wants to do, and if she doesn't
agree he says she will be kidnapped. In the end he
thinks that, because he is armed, because he threatens
her existence, she will have to agree to a "pleasure
marriage" [a temporary sexual union arranged by a
cleric].'

Strong anecdotal evidence gathered by organisations
such as that of Yanar Mohammed and by the Iraqi
Women's Network, run by Hanna Edwar, suggests rape is
also being used as a weapon in the sectarian war to
humiliate families from rival communities. 'So far
what we have been seeing is what you might call
"collateral rape",' says Besmia Khatib of the Iraqi
Women's Network. 'Rape is being used in the settling
of scores in the sectarian war.' Yanar Mohammed
describes how a Shia girl was kidnapped, raped and
dumped in the Husseiniya area of Baghdad. The
retaliation, she says, was the kidnapping and rape of
several Sunni girls in the Rashadiya area. Tit for
tat.

Similar stories are emerging across Iraq. 'Of course
rape is going on,' says Aida Ussayaran, former deputy
Human Rights Minister and now one of the women on the
Council of Representatives. 'We blame the militias.
But when we talk about the militias, many are members
of the police. Any family now that has a good-looking
young woman in it does not want to send her out to
school or university, and does not send her out
without a veil. This is the worst time ever in Iraqi
women's lives. In the name of religion and sectarian
conflict they are being kidnapped and killed and
raped. And no one is mentioning it.'

Women activists are convinced there is substantial
under-reporting of crimes against women in some areas,
particularly involving 'honour killing' - there is a
massive increase against a background of pervasive
violence - and that families often seek death
certificates that will hide the cause. In regions such
as the violent Anbar province, the country's largest,
which borders Jordan and Syria, there is little
reporting of the causes of any death. And activists
complain, in any case, that they have been blocked
from examining bodies at the Medical Forensic
Institute in Baghdad, or collecting their own figures
to build up an accurate picture of what is happening
to women.

While attacks on women have long been the dirty secret
of Iraq's war, the sheer levels of the violence is now
pushing it into the open. Last week in Samawah, 246
kilometres (153 miles) south of Baghdad, three women
and a toddler were killed when gunmen stormed their
home in an unexplained mass murder. Like Dr al-Tallal
in Najaf, they were Shia Muslims in a Shia city. The
three women were shot. The 18-month-old baby had her
throat slit.

In the north, too, last week the killing of women
became more visible, with the al-Jazeera network
reporting that attacks on women in the city of Mosul
had led to an unprecedented rise in the number of
women's bodies being found. Among them was Zuheira, a
young housewife, found shot dead in the suburb of
Gogaly. Salim Zaho, a neighbour, quoted by the
television station, said: 'They couldn't kill her
husband, a police officer, so they came for his wife
instead.'

It is one of the recurring narratives of murder told
by Iraqi women. It is a violence that would not be
possible without a wider, permissive brutalising of
women's lives: one that permeates the 'new Iraq' in
its entirety. For it is not only the religious
militias that have turned women's lives into a living
hell - it is, in some measure, the government itself,
which has allowed ministries run by religious parties
to segregate staff by gender. Some public offices,
including ministries, insist on women staff wearing a
headscarf at all times. A women's shelter, set up by
Yanar Mohammed's group, was closed down by the
government.

Most serious of all are the death threats women
receive for simply working, even in government
offices. Zainub - not her real name - works for a
ministry in Baghdad. One morning, she said, she
arrived at work to find that a letter had been sent to
all the women. 'When I opened up the note it said,
"You will die. You will die".'

The situation has been exacerbated by the undermining
of Iraq's old Family Code, established in 1958, which
guaranteed women a large measure of equality in key
areas such as divorce and inheritance. The new
constitution has allowed the Family Code to be
superseded by the power of the clerics and new
religious courts, with the result that it is largely
discriminatory against women. The clerics have
permitted the creeping re-emergence of men contracting
multiple marriages, formerly discouraged by the old
code. It is these clerics, too, who have permitted a
sharp escalation in the 'pleasure marriages'. And it
is the same clerics overseeing the rapid
transformation of a once secular society - in which
women held high office and worked as professors,
doctors, engineers and economists - into one where
women have been forced back under the veil and into
the home. The result is mapped out every day on Iraq's
streets and in its country lanes in individual acts of
intimidation and physical brutality that build into an
awful whole.

And so in Salman Pak, on the Tigris 15 miles south of
Baghdad, The Observer is told, the Karaa Brigade of
the Ministry of the Interior rounds up some Sunni men.
Later some of the police return to the men's houses
and promise their worried women to help find the
missing men in exchange for sex.

In the Shia neighbourhood of al-Shaab in Baghdad,
militiamen with the Jaish al-Mahdi put out an order
banning women from wearing sandals and certain shoes,
skirts and trousers. They beat up others for wearing
the wrong clothes.

In Amaryah, a Sunni stronghold in Baghdad, Sunni
militants shave three women's heads for wearing the
wrong clothes and lash young men for wearing shorts.
In Zafaraniyah, a largely Shia suburb south of
Baghdad, the Jaish al-Mahdi militiamen wait outside a
school and slap girls not wearing the hijab.

It is a situation bleakly recorded by the Human Rights
Office of the UN Assistance Mission to Iraq. 'There
are reports that, in some Baghdad neighbourhoods,
women are now prevented from going to the markets
alone,' Unami reported. 'In other cases, women have
been warned not to drive cars, or have faced
harassment if they wear trousers. Women have also
reported that wearing a headscarf is becoming not a
matter of religious choice but one of survival in many
parts of Iraq, a fact particularly resented by
non-Muslim women. Female university students are also
facing constant pressure in university campuses.'

'Since the beginning of August it has just been
getting worse,' says Nagham Kathim Hamoody, an
activist with the Iraqi Women's Network in Najaf .
'There are more women being killed and more bodies
being found in the cemetery. I don't know why they are
being killed, but I know the militias are behind the
killing... We went to the mortuary here in Najaf, but
the authorities would not co-operate in helping to
identify the murdered women. There was one doctor,
though, who told us that some of the bodies showed
signs that they had been beaten prior to their
murder.'

And so the painful lives of Iraqi women go on.
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The Inquisitor

Very telling story, obmar.

I think this goes much closer to the true situation for women in wartime. It certainly can't be a bed of roses as many Americans might think.

obmar

Sure, sometimes it is unavoidable, but the victims are women, children and the old.

The Inquisitor

Indeed.

It's always the helpless and the hopeless who suffer the most. For the people of New Orleans, the same group suffered the most. And now, the government is selling off their housing projects, even if no damage occurred. This is to build brand new townhomes and commercial centers for the middle class and wealthy. There are many in the American admin who have said that God did what they couldn't do, "Get rid of the poverty in New Orleans."

These same people are banking on a continued suffering of the peoples of Iraq to accomplish a similar goal, complete and utter chaos for the forseeable future.

obmar

The Inquisitor

A good rule of thumb for comparing the relative costs of the three categories in your organisation is the "1-10-100 Rule". For every dollar or hour your organisation might spend on preventing a quality problem, it will spend 10 to inspect and correct the mistake after it occurs. If the failure goes unchecked or unnoticed until after the customer has received the service, the cost of rectifying the failure will probably be 100 times what you could have paid to prevent it from happening at all.