The Muslim Woman

A victim of rape in Iraq has tried to go against the social custom of suffering mutely but instead has jeopardized her life. She has openly condemned the Iraqi police of sexually molesting her. This is not the first time a criminal case has been framed against the Iraqi officials. A number of organizations have acknowledged sexualized torture as a part of Iraqi prison. According to Iraqi human rights advocate and writer Haifa Zangana, the first question asked of female detainees in Iraq is, Are you Sunni or Shia? The second is, Are you a virgin? It’s no surprise that we’re hearing allegations of rape against the Iraqi National Police, considering who trained them. DynCorp, the private contractor that the Bush Administration hired to prepare Iraq’s new police force for duty, has an ugly record of violence against women. The Bush Administration has refused to protect women’s rights in Iraq. In fact, it has decisively traded women’s rights for cooperation from the Islamists it has helped boost to power. Torture of women by police recruits armed, trained, and funded with US tax dollars is one symptom of this broader crisis. Image Read

Women in Lebanon are busy these days with demining stuff. Nearly seven women are clearing about one million cluster of bombs sprinkled across the south because of the 2006 Israeli offensive. These seven women have been selected from 30 applicants who have had applied for the job, selected by a Swedish demining team. A few of the women left their earlier jobs to join the foreign teams helping in demining areas across southern Lebanon. There are nearly 100,000 bomblets in the region and about 1.2 million clusters have been anticipated across southern Lebanon. Israel had launched a land, sea and air offensive into Lebanon after the Lebanese Shia militant movement Hezbollah snatched two Israeli soldiers during a cross-border attack. The war ended in mid-August with an UN-sponsored ceasefire and these clusters of bombs are the aftermath of that attack. The newly hired women de-miners are mainly Shia Muslims from southern Lebanon. Image Read

Despite becoming victims of permanent threat of shooting, bomb attacks, kidnappings and rape…how a group of Muslim women in Iraq could even think to kill another group of Muslim women? But this is a harsh reality and slowly becoming common practice in Iraq. We all know, condition of Muslim women is worse in most of the Muslim countries. In recent bizarre of events, in the al-Washshash district of the Iraqi capital Baghdad, a gang of Shiite women, a part of the Mahdi army militia killed three Sunni women. The Mahdi Army, Militia or Jaish al Mahdi is paramilitary force created by Iraqi Shias to protect Shia community form Sunnis and U.S led occupation forces. The leader of the gang is Layla, the sister of Jabbar Hammudi, the principal leaders of the Mahdi Army,who was killed few days before. Violence broke out, when some of Sunni women try to protect their homes from a gang of Shiite women. From very long time, the campaign of forced migration of Sunni families in that district of Baghdad, have been carried out by the militias of the Mahdi Army. This incident reminded me of a small footage of Saddam regime where a regiment of women soldiers are killing dogs with their bare hands to show how tough they are. The women who is considered to be kind hearted, soft and loving are becoming more and more violent. Not to mention that this story tells that women, too, may engage in ‘jihad’. And it illustrates, in spades, the fact that the much-vaunted ‘brotherhood’ or ‘sisterhood’ of Muslims, everybody all happy families together, is purely illusory. Unfortunately, women in Iraq are wasting their time to attacking and killing each other and not concentrating on real cause of their suffering and problems. The attempts to kill each other by both the Muslim communities (Shia and Sunni) will only be beneficial for US led forces. I just hope that in the future, society will respect the rights of women, and woman will help the other in all walks of life. via Image

What would a woman get if she dares to hold a professional job? Abduction, rape and murder, yes this is what she would receive at least in Iraq! Religious extremists in the southern Iraqi city of Basra are busy slaughtering the women folk who are going against their religious doctrines by stepping out of the four walls of their house just to earn their livelihood. In some parts of Baghdad, women were being prevented to go to the markets alone. Parents are frightened to send their daughters to school and university. They are constantly being subjected to threats, intimidation and even murder. Perpetrators tend to justify their inhuman deeds of killing a woman by leaving a piece of paper on her or dress her in indecent clothes. Atmosphere is saturated with threat till an extent that the women folk dare not move out in the streets without proper dress code. Grim figures suggest slaughtering of 42 women between July and September alone in the region this year. Abusers have created a kind of propaganda by painting graffiti on walls all across the streets. Women have been receiving warning, while there are cases, when the gunmen themselves are coming to their houses and slaughtering them, in front of their own kids. They are not in a position to spill out their outlook towards life, leave alone going out to work. They have been forced to breathe within a set paradigm of the chauvinistic ridden man made laws 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. Lack of security, law and order has curtailed all aspects of women’s life, for them constructing a safe haven is nothing than a mirage in the arid desert of the province…a wasteland that would never expect a shower of rain. At least this is what an impression I could get from the contemporary times. Image