The Lame Duck and course correction

October 9th, 2006

The first test to see if Bush can be shot out of the water quacking his tired old “stay the course” song is nearing. The Talking Heads on TV, and most particularly those that represent the Red Birds, are saying there will be a course correction and fewer soldiers in Iraq … I believe it was George Will that said it was either that or there wouldn’t be any Republicans in office come ‘08.

The ambitions of the party must, at some point, trump Dub’s personal hubris — perhaps they’ll hold an intervention … I’d like to be the frog on a lilly pad at such a swamp gathering.

Fareed Zakaria, who has kept his centerist opinion to himself while attempting to sort the pieces of this over the years, has finally thrown in the towel. You’ll find his Newsweek report, below. Other bits of news regarding the occupation are sad and chilling, especially for women.

Course correction — needed desperately … and if for no other reason than political maneuver, hopefully coming up.

Jude

Iraq’s Dark Day Of Reckoning
If you were a Shiite, having suffered through a brutal insurgency and an incompetent government, would you give up your weapons?
Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek
Oct. 16, 2006 issue
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15177998/site/newsweek/

When Iraq’s current government was formed last April, after four months of bitter disputes, wrangling and paralysis, many voices in America and in Iraq said the next six months would be the crucial testing period. That was a fair expectation. It has now been almost six months, and what we have seen are bitter disputes, wrangling and paralysis. Meanwhile, the violence has gotten worse, sectarian tensions have risen steeply and ethnic cleansing is now in full swing.

There is really no functioning government south of Kurdistan, only power vacuums that have been filled by factions, militias and strongmen. It is time to call an end to the tests, the six-month trials, the waiting and watching, and to recognize that the Iraqi government has failed. It is also time to face the terrible reality that America’s mission in Iraq has substantially failed.

More waiting is unlikely to turn things around, nor will more troops. I understand the impulse of those who want to send in more forces to secure the country. I urged just such a policy from the first week of the occupation. But today we are where we are. Over the past three years the violence has spread and is now franchised down to neighborhoods with local gangs in control. In many areas, local militias are not even controlled by their supposed political masters in Baghdad. In this kind of decentralized street fighting, 10,000 or 20,000 more troops in Baghdad will not have more than a temporary effect. Nor will new American policies help. The reason that the Democrats seem to lack good, concrete suggestions on Iraq is that the Bush administration has actually been pursuing more- sensible policies for more than a year now, trying vainly to reverse many of its errors. But what might well have worked in 2003 is too little, too late in 2006.

Iraq is now in a civil war. Thirty thousand Iraqis have died there in the past three years, more than in many other conflicts widely recognized as civil wars. The number of internal refugees, mostly Sunni victims of ethnic cleansing, has exploded over the past few months, and now exceeds a quarter of a million people. (The Iraqi government says 240,000, but this doesn’t include Iraqis who have fled abroad or who may not have registered their move with the government.) The number of attacks on Shiite mosques increases every week: there have been 69 such attacks since February, compared with 80 in the previous two and a half years. And the war is being fought on gruesome new fronts. CBS News’s Lara Logan has filed astonishing reports on the Health Ministry, which is run by supporters of radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. According to Logan, hospitals in Baghdad and Karbala are systematically killing Sunni patients and then dumping their bodies in mass graves.

Iraq’s problem is fundamentally political, not military. Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds need a deal that each can live with. Sen. Joseph Biden has outlined an intelligent power-sharing agreement, but what he, or for that matter George Bush, says doesn’t matter. Power now rests with the locals. And the Shiites and the Sunnis have little trust in one another. At this point, neither believes that any deal would be honored once the United States left, which means that each is keeping its own militias as an insurance policy. If you were a Shiite, having suffered through a brutal insurgency and an incompetent government, would you give up your weapons? If you were a Sunni, having watched government-allied death squads kill and ethnic-cleanse your people, would you accept a piece of paper that said that this government will now give you one third of Iraq’s oil revenues if you disarm?

Power-sharing agreements rarely work. Stanford scholar James Fearon points out that in the last 54 civil wars, only nine were resolved by such deals. And the success stories are telling. South Africa after apartheid is perhaps the best example. Despite gaining absolute power through the ballot, the African National Congress chose to share power with its former oppressors. No whites were purged from the Army or civil service. In Iraq, of course, hundreds of thousands of Sunni soldiers and administrators were fired, leaving the country without a state but with an insurgency. And unlike South Africa, Iraq has no dominant political party. It is run by a weak and fractious coalition. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki relies on support from the very extremist groups that he must dismantle-such as Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army.

President Bush says that if America leaves Iraq now, the violence will get worse, and terrorists could take control. He’s right. But that will be true whenever we leave. “Staying the course” only delays that day of reckoning. To be fair, however, Bush has now defined the only realistic goal left for America’s mission in Iraq: not achieving success but limiting failure. ++

The Insanity of ‘Staying the Course’ in Iraq
Joshua Holland, AlterNet
October 9, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/42741/

At this point, the only people left who think that the U.S. must ’stay the course’ in Iraq are Bush’s neocons and al Qaeda.

As the bodies pile up in Iraq, new polls show that most Iraqis want us out of their country, and they want us out soon. At the same time, Al Jazeera acquired a letter believed to be from a high-ranking al Qaeda operative that shows that our worst enemies think a protracted occupation of Iraq is “the most important thing” for the future of their cause.

Yet the Bush administration and its mouthpieces insist that we must “stay the course” in Iraq — either to bring stability to the war-torn country or out of some misguided belief that we can salvage America’s dignity from an embarrassing Vietnam-style defeat.

Underlying the “stay the course” argument is a fundamentally flawed assumption that U.S. troops are at least keeping havoc in check. But every year of the occupation has brought about worsening violence, peaking during a summer that saw thousands of Iraqi civilians killed each month. The Washington Post reported that last month “the number of U.S. troops wounded in Iraq has surged to its highest monthly level in nearly two years,” and Reuters added that “bomb attacks in Baghdad have hit an all-time high …” Studies by the Saudi government and a respected (and hawkish) Israeli think tank found that most of the insurgents in Iraq had never engaged in political violence but were radicalized by the occupation itself. The recently leaked National Intelligence Estimate predicts that with American troops on the ground, the insurgency in Iraq will grow and fester over the next two years.

But more importantly, the U.S. presence creates a Catch-22. One of the biggest problems in Iraq is that its fledgling government has little legitimacy, and a large part of that problem comes from a widespread perception that it remains subservient to U.S. commanders. According to a recent poll by the Project on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA), Iraqis, by a 5 to 2 margin, thought that a U.S. commitment to withdraw would “strengthen the Iraqi government.” Three out of four believe an American withdrawal would make the various factions in Iraq’s parliament more willing to cooperate with one another.

Eight out of ten Iraqis believe the U.S. military presence is “provoking more conflict than it is preventing,” and they’re in the position to know best. Just 14 percent said the U.S. forces were having “a positive influence on the situation in Iraq.”

The idea that Iraq will spiral out of control if U.S. forces withdraw has been hammered home since the beginning of the occupation by the war’s supporters, but while it’s a danger, it is also anything but the certainty that’s become part of the conventional wisdom. Seventy percent of Iraqis have confidence that their police force can maintain order.

The hawks who brought us this war have gone through an exquisite set of intellectual gymnastics to produce new justifications for why we have to stay the course. The latest is that pulling out of Iraq will “embolden” the terrorists. Vice President Cheney said recently that a withdrawal at this point would only “validate the al Qaeda strategy and invite even more terrorist attacks.” The obvious flaw in that argument is that whatever “emboldening” might or might not occur has already happened; before the invasion, the secretary of defense of the most powerful country the world has ever known predicted that the war “could last six days, six weeks” but doubted it would last six months. Yet three and a half years later, a few thousand Iraqi insurgents with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades have kept the leviathan pinned down, and there’s no sign that they’re anywhere close to their “last legs.” They’ve isolated the United States from its allies, stymied U.S. foreign policy from Singapore to the Sudan and halted Bush’s ambitions to “reform” the Middle East. The lesson has already been learned, as evidenced by the Taliban’s adoption of many of the Iraqi insurgents’ tactics in Afghanistan.

This latest administration talking point couldn’t make anyone happier than the leadership of al Qaeda. The Christian Science Monitor’s Dan Murphy reported last week that a letter from a senior al Qaeda leader was discovered in the rubble of the house where Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed in June. Murphy wrote that “al Qaeda itself sees continued American presence in Iraq as a boon for the terror network.” “The most important thing,” wrote the al Qaeda official, is that “prolonging the war is in our interest.”

Iraq’s government is dysfunctional, and that creates an environment ripe for turmoil. Iraqi Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi told Reuters that the U.S. presence — especially under the vague rules in which its forces operate — is “impeding the ability of Iraq’s Shi’ite-led national unity government to tackle rampant violence and economic woes.”

And while the Sunni insurgents have made repeated attempts — the most recent of which came last week — to open up negotiations with the occupation forces, they rejected a call by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to join in the political process earlier this year. The Sunnis — who are not the only combatants at this point — won’t participate in the political process as long as the open-ended occupation continues, and there won’t be stability until they do engage politically — Catch-22.

For all these reasons, majorities of Iraqis of all sects want their government to request a U.S. withdrawal. Seven out of ten want a deadline within a year, while just one in ten want the U.S. to remain until “the security situation approves” — the Bush administration’s line. Even two-thirds of the Kurdish population — long the strongest supporters of U.S. policy — agreed, although many Kurds want a two-year window.

They join majorities of American Democrats and Republicans, and U.S. military personnel in Iraq, all of whom favor a “strategic redeployment” and an end to the occupation (interestingly, three out of four Americans also believe that if the Iraqi government asked the United States to withdraw, it wouldn’t do so).

But Iraqis are getting a taste of U.S.-style democracy, a system in which popular will needs to be managed rather than considered seriously in policymaking.

In September, 104 members of Iraq’s 275-seat parliament sponsored a resolution asking the United States for a timetable to get out. As Raed Jarrar notes, “typically a good 80 MPs haven’t actually been coming to the sessions, so it is possible that the resolution” would have passed with 104 votes. That was unacceptable to both Iraqi and American leaders; the AP reported that a procedural maneuver shelved the resolution for six months (which, conveniently for the United States, will be three months after Iraq’s permanent Oil Law must be passed). A similar resolution in mid-2005 got the support of 103 Iraqi parliamentarians. When that resolution was killed, they signed a petition that accused the National Assembly of “blatantly ignoring the demands of the MPs.”

Even if the request were made, most Iraqis consider us to be “occupiers” rather than “liberators” (A Gallup poll last year found that fewer than one in five Iraqis viewed the U.S. as “liberators”). PIPA found that a “large majority of Iraqis–and a majority in all ethnic groups–believes that the United States plans to maintain permanent military bases in Iraq and would not withdraw its forces if asked by the Iraqi government.”

As a result — at least in part — six out of ten Iraqis approve of attacks on U.S. forces (including among the Shiites that benefited politically from our “liberation”). The insurgency may have started with a small number of Baathist “dead-enders,” but as a result of U.S. mismanagement, it now has broad popular support. And that means it has legs.

The question of whether it would be a net gain to leave Iraq is itself far too narrow. The occupation is having a dangerous ripple effect; the National Intelligence Estimate found that Iraq had become a “cause célèbre” for radical Islamists across the region (and worldwide) and was creating a whole new generation of “jihadists.” That means that the U.S. presence in Iraq is fueling conflicts in neighboring countries, where a major realignment of power between Sunnis and Shiites could easily blow up into a series of regional wars that would make the past few years in Iraq look like a stroll in the park.

And as domestic political pressure to come up with some kind of chimerical victory mounts, U.S. policymakers will find the idea of splitting Iraq into three autonomous zones — long championed by Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., former Ambassador Peter Galbraith and others — more and more appealing. This, too, is contrary to what the Iraqi people want; according to PIPA, “Iraqis appear to agree on having a strong central government, and … majorities of all groups do not favor a movement toward a looser confederation.” According to the Times of London, the Iraq Study Group — the commission headed by former Secretary of State James Baker that has guided much of the disaster in Iraq — may recommend the partition approach. As the University of Michigan’s Juan Cole notes, “If the loose federal plan ends in partition, the situation is set up for a series of wars of the Sunni Arabs versus the Shiites, as well as of the Sunni Arabs and some Turkmen versus the Kurds. Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia will certainly be pulled into these wars.”

Most Americans and Iraqis of every religious sect and political persuasion want the United States to set a timetable for withdrawal, but the Bush administration and al Qaeda’s leaders believe it’s in their best interests to prolong the occupation. What more does one need to know? ++

US Soldiers Wounded in Iraq Reaches Highest Monthly Level
Growing American role in staving off civil war leads to most wounded since 2004.
Ann Scott Tyson, The Washington Post
Sunday 08 October 2006
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/07/AR2006100700907.html

The number of U.S. troops wounded in Iraq has surged to its highest monthly level in nearly two years as American GIs fight block-by-block in Baghdad to try to check a spiral of sectarian violence that U.S. commanders warn could lead to civil war.

Last month, 776 U.S. troops were wounded in action in Iraq, the highest number since the military assault to retake the insurgent-held city of Fallujah in November 2004, according to Defense Department data. It was the fourth-highest monthly total since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

The sharp increase in American wounded - with nearly 300 more in the first week of October - is a grim measure of the degree to which the U.S. military has been thrust into the lead of the effort to stave off full-scale civil war in Iraq, military officials and experts say. Beyond Baghdad, Marines battling Sunni insurgents in Iraq’s western province of Anbar last month also suffered their highest number of wounded in action since late 2004.

More than 20,000 U.S. troops have been wounded in combat in the Iraq war, and about half have returned to duty. While much media reporting has focused on the more than 2,700 killed, military experts say the number of wounded is a more accurate gauge of the fierceness of fighting because advances in armor and medical care today allow many service members to survive who would have perished in past wars. The ratio of wounded to killed among U.S. forces in Iraq is about 8 to 1, compared with 3 to 1 in Vietnam.

“These days, wounded are a much better measure of the intensity of the operations than killed,” said Anthony H. Cordesman, a military expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

The surge in wounded comes as U.S. commanders issue increasingly dire warnings about the threat of civil war in Iraq, all but ruling out cuts in the current contingent of more than 140,000 U.S. troops before the spring of 2007. Last month Gen. John P. Abizaid, the top commander in the Middle East, said “sectarian tensions, if left unchecked, could be fatal to Iraq,” making it imperative that the U.S. military now focus its “main effort” squarely on Baghdad.

Thousands of additional U.S. troops have been ordered to Baghdad since July to reinforce Iraqi soldiers and police who failed to halt - or were in some cases complicit in - a wave of hundreds of killings of Iraqi civilians by rival Sunni and Shiite groups.

U.S. commanders have appealed for weeks for 3,000 more Iraqi army troops to help secure Baghdad but as of Thursday had received only a few hundred, according to military officials in the Iraqi capital. Mistrust of Iraqi police in Baghdad remains high, Abizaid said. Last week, an Iraqi police brigade with hundreds of officers was removed from duty over its involvement in sectarian killings.

“The Baghdad security plan and the general spiral of operations is driving us to be more active than we have been in recent months,” said Michael E. O’Hanlon, a military analyst at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank. “We have more people on patrols and out of base, so we get more people hurt and killed in firefights,” he said, explaining that U.S. military offensives - more than other factors such as shifting enemy tactics - tend to drive the number of American
casualties.

In March, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said that Iraqi forces - not U.S . troops - would deal with a civil war in Iraq “to the extent one were to occur.” Today’s operations in Baghdad demonstrate that that goal was not realistic, experts say.

“In a sense, the Baghdad security plan is a complete repudiation of the earlier Rumsfeld doctrine where he said the Iraqis would prevent the civil war,” said O’Hanlon.

Despite the mounting cost in U.S. wounded and dead - including 13 American soldiers killed in combat in Baghdad in three days last week - Pentagon officials say aggressive military operations in the Iraqi capital are at best a short-term and partial solution, buying time for political compromise, which they call the only way to arrest Iraq’s disintegration.

“The Baghdad security plan will only be a temporary fix,” said a Pentagon official who has served in Iraq. “You need to address the root causes,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.

The rising toll of wounded reflects ongoing heavy combat in Anbar as well as in Baghdad, where U.S. troops face an escalation of small-arms and other attacks as they push into the city’s most violent neighborhoods to rein in sectarian death squads, militias and insurgents, officers say.

“Attacks against the coalition have definitely increased as … the enemy is trying to come in and reestablish themselves” in a dozen religiously divided districts in east and west Baghdad, said Lt. Col. Jonathan Withington, a spokesman for the U.S. military command in the city. “There’s a lot of weapons in Baghdad,” contributing to an increase in enemy attacks using small arms, he said.

Withington said he was not authorized to release the number of U.S. military personnel wounded in Baghdad or the number of attacks in the city, although the military has released such data in the past.

A survey of reports on combat deaths from August through early October, however, shows an increase in those killed in Baghdad from small-arms fire as well as bombs along roads. Dense urban terrain in the city of 6 million people, where enemy fighters have many places to hide and can attack from close quarters, reduces the advantage of the better-trained and better-equipped U.S. forces.

“September was horrific” in terms of the toll of wounded, and if the early October trend continues, this month could be “the worst month of the war,” said John E. Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a Virginia-based Web site that tracks defense issues.

The worsening violence in Baghdad has led some Pentagon officials to criticize decisions by the U.S. military since early 2005 to transfer responsibility for security in large swaths of Baghdad to Iraqi forces while cutting back on American patrols.

“We made decisions to take an indirect approach, which is great if you want low U.S. casualty rates,” said the Pentagon official. However, he said: “Passing responsibility to Iraqis does not equal defeating terrorists and neutralizing the insurgency. Period.” ++

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, The Observer
Sunday October 8, 2006
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1890260,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=12

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. ++

What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers

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Entry Filed under: Political Waves