More On The Decline of Women’s Rights in Iraq

Thanks to brilliant at breakfast for the link to the following first hand account of one woman’s observations on the decline of women’s rights in Iraq since the occupation began. Clearly, this is a step backward for the women of Iraq. This is what Bush bragged about freeing the Afghanistani women from. Why isn’t more being done to protect the women of Iraq?

Across the country, a steady clampdown on women’s rights has been going unreported and unchecked by the government. Islamic terrorism is killing and injuring Iraqi women daily, employing among other weapons, acid attacks.

My women’s rights group, the Organisation of Women’s Freedom in Iraq, has been documenting part of the upsurge in violence against women. In March this year, for example, followers of the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr targeted an outing of students from Basra University. Playing football and listening to music, the mixed group was attacked in Basra Public Park. One male student was killed trying to defend his female friends against Islamists who literally tore the women’s clothes off their bodies. Sadr’s men photographed the dishevelled, half-dressed women, and told them that their parents would receive the photos if they didn’t refrain in future from “immoral” behaviour.

More widely, professional women have been deliberately targeted and killed - notably in the city of Mosul - and, recently, anti-women Islamists in Baghdad have taken to throwing acid in women’s faces and on to their uncovered legs.

So-called “honour killings” are rife, as is the kidnapping and rape of women. Beheadings have occurred and women have been sold into sexual servitude. When I was in Baghdad a few months ago, I couldn’t go anywhere without a bodyguard. The sense of danger and threat was tangible.

Islamist repression against women is a campaign of “moral” terror. Leaflets, graffiti and verbal warnings in their thousands warn women against going out unveiled, against putting on make-up, and against shaking hands or mixing with men. Female doctors have been prevented from treating male patients, and male doctors warned not to attend to women.

This is a recipe for future gender enslavement, second-class citizenship and ignorance. Thousands of female university students have now given up their studies to protect themselves against Islamist threats.

Islamist hostility is contagious and echoed daily in high-level political debate. Currently there is a drive over the “right” of men to have four wives, to make divorce a male preserve and for custody of children to be given to men only. Even women on Iraq’s National Assembly - the country’s parliament - have been calling for resolutions to allow for the beating of women by their guardians (males relatives, such as husbands or fathers).

This is all the outcome of the occupation of Iraq. This has been pursued under the name of liberation, but what we actually see is women increasingly losing their freedom, while political Islamists feel free to terrorise them. The Islamicists pour into this invaded, so-called Muslim land in order, they say, to liberate it; but in reality, neither the US nor the Islamists are our liberators. They both really fight for power and influence in Iraq and in the region. [“Houzan Mahmoud: Iraq must reject a constitution that enslaves women”]

tags: Women's Rights, Iraq, Afghanistan, Islam

Leave a comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.