Women lose ground in the new Iraq

By Nancy Trejos

updated 3:51 a.m. ET Dec. 16, 2006

BAGHDAD - Browsing the shelves of a cosmetics store in the Karrada shopping district, Zahra Khalid felt giddy at the sight of Alberto shampoo and Miss Rose eye shadow, blusher and powder.

Before leaving her house, she had covered her body in a billowing black abaya and wrapped a black head scarf around her thick brown hair. She had asked her brother to drive. She had done all the things that a woman living in Baghdad is supposed to do these days to avoid drawing attention to herself.

It was the first time she had left home in two months.

"For a woman, it's just like being in jail," she said. "I can't go anywhere."

Life has become more difficult for most Iraqis since the February bombing of a Shiite Muslim mosque in Samarra sparked a rise in sectarian killings and overall lawlessness. For many women, though, it has become unbearable.

As Islamic fundamentalism seeps into society and sectarian warfare escalates, more and more women live in fear of being kidnapped or raped. They receive death threats because of their religious sects and careers. They are harassed for not abiding by the strict dress code of long skirts and head scarves or for driving cars.

Once a progressive country
For much of the 20th century, and under various leaders, Iraq was one of the most progressive Middle Eastern countries in its treatment of women, who were encouraged to go to school and enter the workforce. Saddam Hussein's Baath Party espoused a secular Arab nationalism that advocated women's full participation in society. But years of war changed that.

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In the days after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, many women were hopeful that they would enjoy greater parity with men. President Bush said that increasing women's rights was essential to creating a new, democratic Iraq.

But interviews with 16 Iraqi women, ranging in age from 21 to 52, show that much of that postwar hope is gone. The younger women say they fear being snatched on their way to school and wonder whether their college degrees will mean anything in the new Iraq. The older women, proud of their education and careers, are watching their independence slip away.

"At the beginning, we were very happy with those achievements and gains, and we were looking for more," said Ina'am al-Sultani, 36, a leader of the Progressive Women's Movement, a nongovernmental organization. "Women are now restrained."

Khalid, 30, whose only visible features as she shopped on a recent day were her round face and long eyelashes, was an accountant at the Planning Ministry until she received a death threat four months ago. She quit, moved to a new home and changed her phone number.

"We're suffering right now," Khalid said, her two sons tugging at her abaya. "The war took all our rights. We're not free because of terrorism."

Before the war, Sundus Abbas, 38, was a researcher at a governmental organization. After the war, she became a women's rights activist.

After Saddam Hussein was forced out of power, many women like Abbas appeared on television talk shows and wrote newspaper articles challenging traditional views on marriage and other family issues and demanding that women be granted a greater role in government.

"They were there asking for their rights loudly and clearly," said Maysoon al-Damluji, a member of parliament.

There were signs of success. Twenty-five percent of the seats in the new National Assembly were reserved for women. Under Hussein, only one ministry was headed by a woman, Damluji said. Now, of the 38 ministry heads, four are women.

Iraqi women had been earning university degrees since the 1920s. Many earned master's degrees and doctorates and became physicians, engineers and lawyers.

Then came the 1980s war with Iran and the embargo imposed after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Hussein, who began embracing Islamic and tribal traditions as a way to consolidate power, forbade women younger than 45 to travel abroad without a male relative.

Encouraged by Bush, women began to reassert themselves after 2003. But the collapse of security, the absence of the rule of law and the presence of extremist groups have weakened the budding movement, activists said. In the past year, its leaders have received death threats. Politicians have accused them of working in collusion with enemy countries, and police officers have harassed them, activists said.

On June 4, Abbas received an anonymous e-mail at her Baghdad office warning her to leave Iraq within 10 days. Three days later, another e-mail said she would be killed for not complying with the first threat.

She stayed home and canceled her scheduled appearances. A third threat came June 10 in a telephone text message. She recalled thinking that she did not want to be killed in front of her parents, who had already lost a daughter in a U.S. airstrike.

"I left with a feeling of humiliation and bitterness," she wrote in an e-mail from an undisclosed location. "Just imagine, I left my home, my family, my work and my city, for nowhere."

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