>>> Dirty bastards.
>>>
>>> ╠☼╣Ǚ∑§â€Ð_ID_SBR_X|||DI©*J*Ω∏lol؟♫1ﷲ☻∞= 8☺╣☼╠? wrote:
>>>
>>>> Iraq's moslem militias target women - Abduction, rape and murder
>>>>
>>>> Hidden victims of a brutal conflict: Iraq's women
>>>>
>>>>
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1890260,00.html
>>>>
>>>> Abduction, rape and murder are the punishments for any woman who
>>>> dares to hold a professional job.
>>>>
>>>> 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 moslem 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.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> moslem cartoon character muhammad was a child molester and goat fucker
>>>>
