On April 19, two guest speakers shocked an RWC audience with some grim statistics on the treatment of Iraqi women since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. The two women speakers were Yifat Susskind, Communications Direction of Madre, an international women’s human rights organization, and Yanar Mohammed, President of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI). According to Susskind, Madre has been working for more than 20 years in support of women battling poverty, violence, and despair.
Recently, Madre has been working with OWFI to help women in Iraq have a better lifestyle than what they have had in the past few years. Together they have launched the Underground Railroad for Iraqi Women, which is a secret escape route for Iraqi women who are threatened with “honor killing.”
“Women should be able to live to a universal standard,” Mohammed said.
According to Susskind and Mohammed, before the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, the lifestyle of Iraqi women was getting better. They could go to school and wear whatever they wanted to wear. Women were in jobs of high position and power like doctors, lawyers and even judges. Now, they say, women are being killed in the middle of the streets.
“The moment the politics changed, we lost it all,” said Mohammed. “Even through under Sadam it was a dictatorship, there was still more freedom for women,” she said.
While the U.S. has been in Iraq, Iraqi women have had to face gender based violence such as public beatings, death threats, sexual assaults, “honor killings,” domestic abuse, beheadings, public hangings, and many other horrible things, Mohammed said.
The U.S. did not stop the attacks or violence, she said. Instead, the violence only spread. A recent body count of Iraqi women in a Baghdad morgue was 152 during one month, she said, and many of the women were tortured.
Mohammed said that most of the widespread violence has been committed by Shiite militias that are affiliated with U.S. backed government. These groups have waged their campaign of “terror against women” with weapons and money provided by the U.S. under a policy called the “Salvador Option,” she explained.
Iraqi women are not only attacked in the streets but also in prisons. Mohammed claimed that almost 75 percent of Iraqi female prisoners have been sexually assaulted and/or tortured because of lack of supervision.
That’s why OWFI has created a program called Women’s Prisons Watch, to prevent women from being raped and tortured while in the police stations, she said.