{"id":1764,"date":"2005-08-04T13:38:45","date_gmt":"2005-08-04T20:38:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2005\/08\/04\/women-in-iraq-the-first-priority-is-to-survive\/"},"modified":"2005-08-04T13:38:45","modified_gmt":"2005-08-04T20:38:45","slug":"women-in-iraq-the-first-priority-is-to-survive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=1764","title":{"rendered":"Women in Iraq: "The first priority is to survive.""},"content":{"rendered":"

Via Volsunga<\/a>, an interview with Iraqi women’s rights activist Yanar Mohammed<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The first priority is to survive. The moment you step onto the street, you are an immediate target just because you are female. If a woman goes out, she may be assaulted, she may be kidnapped. The gangsters are very organised. Ransom is becoming an everyday thing. A gang kidnaps a woman and they contact her family to ask for a fat ransom. Unfortunately, some families will ask whether anything sexual has happened to the woman. If it has, they won’t want her back.<\/p>\n

Even apart from this the streets are not women-friendly. Many professional women who drive to and from work get insulted by men travelling around in pick-up trucks holding machine guns and wearing black from head to foot. Going out in the streets is scary. Many females have stopped going to school.<\/p>\n

In many mosques they preach that a female should leave school in Grade 6, because otherwise she will be mixing with males and evil will happen.[…]<\/p>\n

If you travel from the north down through Iraq to the south, it is like being in a time machine. You travel from the 21st century in Sulamaniya, through Kirkuk to Baghdad, where you see a city which is in ruins. There is dust everywhere, and people are wearing very old clothes. Then in the south you are in the Dark Ages. In the areas dominated by the Sunni Islamists, in Fallujah or in Mosul, women’s situation is even worse than in Basra. You have something there which is new to us in Iraq. It comes from Wahhabism, from al Qaeda, from Saudi Arabia.<\/p>\n

In that culture women are just a tool for production of children and sexual entertainment of men. Young females are promised by their families to other males in the tribe, in a very inhumane way. On top of that, women are considered to be sources of evil, and that is why we need to be covered from top to toe.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The entire interview<\/a> is worth reading.<\/p>\n

She’s careful to point out that problems for women’s rights existed under Hussain’s rule as well; The invasion and occupation have made things much worse for Iraqi women, but what existed before wasn’t utopian.<\/p>\n

I wish I knew of a solution. That the Republican idea that freedom can be created through invasion has been discredited doesn’t provide much comfort for women in Iraq who have had their rights taken away. We’ve squandered away any shred of moral credibility we had in the region, and we don’t have enough soldiers to remake entire cultures at gunpoint. Frankly, I doubt there is anything substantial the US can do to clean up the enourmous mess we’ve made.<\/p>\n

At the very least, we should establish, as much as security concerns allow, an “open door” immigration policy for any Iraqi woman who wants to move to the US in order to avoid the tyranny of radical fundimentalist Islamic law. Since we can’t offer them freedom in their own land from tyrants we’ve empowered, we should at least offer an escape route.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Via Volsunga, an interview with Iraqi women’s rights activist Yanar Mohammed: The first priority is to survive. The moment you step onto the street, you are an immediate target just because you are female. If a woman goes out, she … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40,42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-international-issues","category-iraq"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1764"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1764\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}