Position of Women in iraq after the US-led War
 

Today's Guardian has this shocking story.
[URL]http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2082705,00.html[/URL]

Excerpt:
[quote]
The video, originally posted on jebar.info <http://www.jebar.info>, a
Kurdish website, was soon plastered all over the internet: a young girl
in a red tracksuit jacket and black pants was being beaten, kicked and
stoned to death by a mob of excited, shouting men. It is a gruesome
marriage of 21st-century technology and medieval barbarity. At one
point, bloody and dazed, the girl tries to protect herself, whereupon a
man drops a big rock or lump of concrete on her face, killing her. Her
crime? Doaa Khalil Aswad, a 17-year-old member of the Kurdish Yazidi
religious minority, a non-Muslim sect, had fallen in love with a Sunni
boy and possibly converted to Islam. For this "crime" against family and
community, Doaa was murdered in the village of Beshika, near Mosul, in a
collective act of woman hatred, led by her brothers and uncles. In the
video you can see local policemen watching and one man recording the
killing on his mobile phone.
....
The true extent of the violence may never be known. According to Yifat Susskind, author of this year's report by women's human rights group Madre entitled Promising Democracy, Imposing Theocracy: Gender-Based Violence and the US War on Iraq, comprehensive statistics don't exist: the Iraqi institutions responsible for collecting human rights data are complicit in human rights abuses and, besides, the Iraqi prime minister has told the Ministry of Health not to publish figures on civilian fatalities.

"I haven't seen the United States offering any protection for women," Mahmoud told me. Indeed, America is part of the problem. Think of Abeer Qassim al-Janabi, the 14-year-old girl raped and then murdered with her family by US soldiers in Mahmoudiya in March last year. Think of the women imprisoned at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, sometimes only for being the wife or sister of a man US forces were looking for. Think of women terrorised by soldiers who break into their homes and hold them at gunpoint. Given the punishments meted out to "unchaste" women, victims are unlikely to report rapes committed by US or allied soldiers or Iraqi military or police forces - but if the case of Abeer was unique, this would be the first military occupation in history in which the invaders and their local sidekicks didn't help themselves to girls and women.
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