More on the conditions for women in Iraq
Yesterday, shortly after I posted Yanar Mohammed’s report about the current conditions facing women in Iraq, my phone rang. It was Dr. Lynette Dumble of the Global Sisterhood Network. In as much as she is in Australia and I am in the U.S., this was not an everyday occurence. Lynette was deeply upset by Yanar’s report and hoping that somehow we could come up with some way to stop this madness. Would that we could. Today unfortunately brings more accounts of what is happening to women in Iraq.
Dahr Jamail & Ali Al-Fadhily in their article, “Widows Become the Silent Triage”, document one of the rarely discussed aspects of how the war in Iraq impacts the lives of women. In a country where it is now dangerous for women to leave their homes without male protection, the loss of a spouse seriously impacts a woman’s ability to survive and take care of her children. And as one woman quoted in the story puts it,
“We have never lived our lives as human beings should live,” 42-year-old Dr Shatha Ahmed told IPS at her home in Baghdad. “The Iraq-Iran war took our fathers, and now the Bush war is taking our husbands and sons.”
Houzan Mahmoud also writes this in a commentary for The Guardian,
“Many Iraqi women now face violence and even death at the hands of their relatives who are increasingly resorting to “honour” killings in the name of tradition. It is the security vacuum that the occupation has brought that allows this to happen at such extreme levels, as well as the increased power it has delivered to the most reactionary forces in Iraq society.”
All this of course is in sharp contrast with most of the mainstream media coverage of the violence in Iraq which persists in limiting their reporting for the most part to talking about troops, bombs, militias, terrorists and politicians, none of which even vaguely tell the truth that when you shoot people and drop bombs, you destroy homes and cities, and injure and kill people. If they truly told that part of the story, there would be no war.
Filed under: Uncategorized, Atrocities, Commentary
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