Violations of 'Islamic teachings' take deadly toll on Iraqi women

[DesertRat]

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- The images in the Basra police file are nauseating: Page after page of women killed in brutal fashion -- some strangled to death, their faces disfigured; others beheaded. All bear signs of torture.

The women are killed, police say, because they failed to wear a headscarf or because they ignored other "rules" that secretive fundamentalist groups want to enforce.

(snip)

After the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, Sawsan says, the situation was "the best." But now, she says, it's "the worst."

"We thought there would be freedom and democracy and women would have their rights. But all the things we were promised have not come true. There is only fear and horror."
http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/02/08/iraq.women/index.html

[thunder rising]

1. As long as the women do nothing about it, the society will not change.

But it's not our problem. If the society is to change the women of Islam are going to have to change it.

[donsu]

2. we have caused the dire straights of Iraq women - we did it!

and now you want the victims to fix it?

women had it much better under Saddam. and now they are being raped and murdered by religiously insane men. and tortured!

the US needs to FIX IT because we BROKE IT

[DesertRat]

3. Bush lied about liberating Iraqis

Remember those photos of Iraqi men and women proudly holding up their inked fingers for western cameras after voting in their new "democracy"? They were presented to the world by our government as an indication of a policy that would liberate the Iraqis.

Nothing could be further from the truth!

[flashl]

4. What is 'our' role in the violations of 'Islamic teachings'?

The Rape Of Iraq And Other Sexual Matters

By Suki Falconberg Ph.D.

I just e-mailed the following paragraph to Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Refugees International, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, Iraq Veterans Against the War, and two women journalists at CBS news, Katie Couric and Lara Logan (foreign correspondent in Iraq):

I would like to know more about the sexual assault on women in Iraq:

• rapes by American and coalition forces;
• rapes by the Iraqi police and military;
• rapes by Iraqi civilian men; rapes of women and girls detained in prisons;
• gang rapes;
• women forced into starvation prostitution—either for the occupying forces or for Iraqis;
• the increase of brothels in Baghdad and Basra as a result of the occupation; the trafficking of women and girls into prostitution by criminal gangs, either within Iraq or in surrounding countries;
• the way families are forced to sell daughters for survival;
• any ´survival sex´ women and girls are engaged in due to desperation;
• 'survival sex' forced upon the refugee population (2 million in Iraq--2 million in surrounding countries);
• the trafficking, by U.S. military contractors, of Filipina and Chinese girls into brothels in the Green Zone;
• the role of the U.S. Military Police in the pimping of Iraqi women and girls;
• the physical and psychological state of the prostituted Iraqi girls trafficked into the Green Zone for paid rape;
• the rape of female military personnel by their own men—and anything else you may have seen going on in Iraq.

...

It is time. Katie Couric and Lara Logan (the latter journalist has been 'embedded' with the troops over there), it is time you report on all the women and girls, in Iraq, and all the Iraqi refugee women and girls in surrounding countries forced into survival sex. It is time you profiled the 14-year-old Iraqi refugee girl sold by her family in order to feed her younger brothers and sisters.

American Chronicle