Iraqi women face unprecedented violence

The US four-year-long occupation of Iraq has considerably worsened the lives of the country's women, MADRE, a New York-based international women's and human rights organization charged in "Promising Democracy, Imposing Theocracy: Gender-Based Violence and the US War on Iraq," a report launched on Mar. 6. Speakers at the launch stressed that the report's retelling of the war from the perspective of Iraqi women illuminates the strong links between women's human rights and democratic rights–the two things that they allege the US is ignoring in Iraq. "Contrary to its rhetoric and its legal obligations under the Hague and Geneva Conventions, the Bush administration has refused to protect women's human rights in Iraq. In fact, it has decisively traded women's rights for cooperation from the [Islamic fundamentalists] whom it boosted to power," said Yifat Susskind, MADRE communications director and author of the report. The report says the unprecedented violence against women has its roots in the days before the invasion, when the Bush administration ignored warnings from women's rights organizations that overthrowing the Baath party would empower fundamentalist forces who seek to curtail women's rights. Those warnings proved accurate, when two Shiite fundamentalist political parties–the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and the Dawa Party–rose to power militarily and politically. Their anti-woman views were later cemented in Iraq's new constitution, which declared Islam the official religion and contained provisions that compromised women's rights, Susskind said. The report argues that the rise of theocratic militias in Iraq is the result of deliberate plans by US officials. After banning Iraq's secular Baath regime in June 2003, the US government set a tight deadline to establish a new Iraqi democracy to justify its military action in the country. According to the report, to meet that self-imposed deadline, the US government compromised its stated commitment to gender equality and negotiated with Islamic religious fundamentalists. Like religious fundamentalists in the US and elsewhere, Islamic fundamentalists see the subordination of women as a top priority–both a microcosm and precondition of the social order they seek to establish. As in Iran, Algeria and Afghanistan, a campaign of violence against women was the first salvo in their war to establish a theocracy in Iraq, the report says. The UN and Amnesty International have documented that attacks on women began just weeks after the US invasion in 2003. Chief among the groups brought to power by the US invasion is the SCIRI, whose militia, the Badr Brigades, was trained by the Iranian government. Immediately after overthrowing Saddam Hussien, the Bush administration appointed SCIRI leader Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim to the country's Governing Council. The US then recruited members of the Badr Brigade to join the Iraqi police and military. Since gaining power, those fundamentalist officials have cracked down on women's rights, leading to unprecedented levels of assault, abductions, public beatings, death threats, sexual assaults, so called honor killings, domestic abuse, torture in detention, beheadings, shootings and public hangings of Iraqi women, according to the report. Girls have been kept out of school and women off the streets and increasingly out of jobs, leading to a public sphere dominated by men. So-called misery gangs and punishment committees enforce new restrictions on women's dress and behavior, according to the report. Within a year after the US occupation, fundamentalists were killing Iraqi artists, intellectuals, professionals, ethnic and religious minorities, lesbians and gays, according to the report. US authorities took no steps to stop the violence, and soon the attacks spread, according to Houzan Mahmoud, a representative of the Organization for Women's Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), who spoke at the launch. Mahmoud received a death threat last week from Ansar al-Islam, "a notoriously [Islamic fundamentalist] jihadist group based in Kurdistan." She says the threat stems from her support of feminist reforms in Kurdistan's regional Constitution which Ansar al-Islam opposes. According to Susskind, the most widespread violence has been committed by the Shiite militias affiliated with the US-backed government–the Badr Brigade and the Mahdi Army. These groups have waged their campaign of terror against women with weapons, training and money provided by the US under a policy called the "Salvador Option," according to MADRE. The "Salvador Option" is a reference to the military assistance program of the 1980s, initiated under Carter and pursued by the Reagan administration, in which the US trained and materially supported the Salvadoran military in its counter-insurgency campaign against popularly supported Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) guerrillas. Over 75,000 Salvadorans–primarily civilians–died during the 1980s as a result of state repression of the FMLN guerrillas and their sympathizers, according to the UN. Ironically, El Salvador now has close to 400 soldiers in Iraq. Susskind pointed to the recent allegations of rape against Iraqi security forces as examples of US involvement giving rise to violence against women. On Feb. 19, a 20-year-old Sunni woman accused three Iraqi policemen of raping her after she was detained during a search of her house in Baghdad. On Feb. 22, four Iraqi soldiers were accused of raping a 50-year old Sunni woman and attempting to rape her two daughters. What stands out, Susskind said, is that "those accused rapists have been trained and armed and funded by the United States." Statistics about the prevalence of violence against women are not compiled by the Iraqi government. But, Susskind says, "across-the-board" anecdotal evidence proves what is widely accepted by international human rights organizations to be true: that violence against women has risen ever since the US invaded Iraq in 2003.