Newsweek: Iraq's Hidden War (Against Women Activists)

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7038038/site/newsweek/

When the kidnappers came for Zeena al Qushtaini, she was dressed, as one friend put it, "in the latest fashion." She wore a $5,000 watch, her hands were manicured and her hair was highlighted to accent her blue eyes. Many of her friends were women's rights activists, but few were as conspicuously modern as Qushtaini. She was a divorced, single mother in her late 30s who supported two children with a full-time office job. She also ran a pharmacy with her business partner, Dr. Ziad Baho.

It was evening at the pharmacy, and Qushtaini and Baho were behind the counter when six men in business suits burst in brandishing automatic weapons. The men wrapped duct tape across the mouths of Qushtaini and Baho, then took them away in a pair of SUVs. Relatives of the two captives waited for a ransom demand that never came. When the bodies were found 10 days later, beside a highway just south of Baghdad, Baho had been beheaded. Qushtaini was dressed in the long black gown favored by Islamic fundamentalists. A scarf covered her hair—something she never wore in life. It was bloodied from the single bullet to the side of her head.

The twin messages, of her life and her death, were unmistakable. There are a lot of women in Iraq who are looking forward to the freedom that Iraq's experiment with democracy promises them. And there are hard-liners who would kill them for it. Qushtaini was one of many prominent Iraqi women who have been slaughtered, apparently by Islamic extremists; 20 have been killed in Mosul alone, and a dozen more in Baghdad. Just last week the corpse of a female television presenter turned up with a bullet hole in her head. Raiedah Mohammed Wageh Wazan had been kidnapped by gunmen in Mosul on Feb. 20. Her husband decided not to hold a funeral procession after being warned against it by insurgents.

The terrorists are a minority, yet they are not the only worry for secular-minded Iraqis. As elected officials enter a third week of wrangling over forming a new government, leading Iraqi women are concerned that they'll lose out. On the face of it, they should be pleased. Nearly a third of the newly elected legislators are women, which is unprecedented in the region. (In neighboring Saudi Arabia, for instance, women can't even vote.) And Iraq's politicians have agreed to a transitional law that encourages equal rights for women in the new Constitution. But the National Assembly's makeup was the result of a quota imposed by the former American administrator, L. Paul Bremer III. Only his veto kept an earlier Iraqi government, the appointed Governing Council, from imposing Islamic Sharia on family matters. And Americans don't have such veto power any longer.

[Erika]

1. Their 1st Constitutional Draft

included Sharia law which made women subject to males in every way. As the article said if Bremer hadn't vetoed it, it would have gone through. I remember this well because I had called my DC reps about the draft. We've lost 21 female troops in Iraq with many more injured. Their losses should not result in women being placed under Sharia law.

I'll wait to see if this happens and if W says they are a sovereign nation and can now make their own rules.

[genieroze]

2. Why do these men hate women so much, these men are sick f**ks. eom