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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.

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Originally posted by marzo:
Were Iraqi women, and the entire country, better off under Saddam Hussein's regime than under the USA-British occupation?

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Saddam better for Women

UN: Women better off under Saddam

Iraqi Women No Better Off, U.N. Official Says

Iraq was better off under Saddam

Torture in Bush's Iraq Worse Than Under Saddam

Who Defends Iraq's Women?

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Were Iraqi women, and the entire country, better off under Saddam Hussein's regime than under the USA-British occupation? I don't know.

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Absolutely yes, they were. Iraqi women were able to hold jobs, wear makeup and appear in public in whatever fashion they wished under Saddam's rule. All of which had long been an outrage to a great many of the country's arab neighbours and probably contributed to their tolerance of the u.s. invasion.

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Originally posted by otter:

As for the u.s. declarations of rape and torture dungeons, hell that is the norm for that part of the world and it is a good bet that practically every one of Iraq's neighbours still blatantly
operate the same sort of dungeons.

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