Violence Against Women Under US Occupation

Iraq's Other War

By YIFAT SUSSKIND

Last week, Houzan Mahmoud* opened her e-mail and found
a message from Ansar al-Islam, a notoriously brutal
Sunni jihadist group. The message read simply, "we
will kill you by the middle of March." Houzan is an
outspoken Iraqi feminist. The 34-year-old journalist
and women's rights activist believes that hope for
Iraq's future depends on building a society based on
secular democracy and human rights. For this, she has
been condemned to death.

Houzan is hardly alone in this regard. Since the US
invaded Iraq, women there have endured a wave of death
threats, assassinations, abductions, public beatings,
targeted sexual assaults, and public hangings. Much of
this violence is systematic-directed by both Sunni and
Shiite Islamist militias that mushroomed across Iraq
after the US toppled the mostly secular Ba'ath regime.
We've heard about the brutality of the Sunni-based
groups, but much less about the Shiite militias that
are the armed wings of the political parties that the
US boosted into power. Their aim is to establish an
Islamist theocracy and their social vision requires
the subjugation of women and the elimination of anyone
with a competing vision for Iraq's future.

The "misery gangs" of these Shiite militias now patrol
the streets of Iraq's major cities, attacking women
who don't dress or behave to their liking. In many
places, they kill women who wear pants or appear in
public without a headscarf. In much of Iraq, women are
virtually confined to their homes because of the
likelihood of being beaten, raped, or abducted in the
streets. As the occupying power, the US was obligated
by the Hague and Geneva Conventions to provide
security to Iraqi civilians, including protection from
violence against women. But the US military,
preoccupied with battling the Iraqi insurgency, simply
ignored the reign of terror that Islamist militias
were imposing on women. In fact, the US enabled these
attacks: in 2005, the Pentagon began providing the
Shiite Badr Brigade and Mahdi Army with weapons,
money, and military training in the hope that these
groups would help combat the Sunni-based insurgency.

Today, we are told that the Shiite militias are a
threat, that they have used Iraq's police and security
forces to wage a sectarian civil war against Sunnis,
and that new formations of radical Shiite groups are
attacking US soldiers. Bush's new Baghdad security
plan is aimed in part at reigning in the Mahdi Army in
particular, though the group has been systematically
torturing and killing women for more than three years.

So, has the Bush Administration finally realized that
we shouldn't be supporting people who assassinate
human rights workers and feminists? Hardly. A new
covert White House policy exposed last week by
journalist Seymour Hersh is funneling money to Sunni
jihadist groups like the one that is threatening
Houzan Mahmoud. The idea is to use these groups to
combat militant Shiite forces allied with Iran and
active in Iraq and Lebanon. It's the same old
disastrous logic: support your enemy's enemy-even if
they have ties to Al Qaeda.

Houzan Mahmoud is not surprised by this newest twist
in Bush's "war on terror." She has seen first-hand
that for all its talk of bringing democracy to Iraq,
the Bush Administration has traded the rights of more
than half of the population-Iraq'

s women-for
cooperation from the Shiite extremists whom it wagered
could deliver stability. With those hopes dashed, the
Administration is now backing a different horse-one
that is just as woman hating and anti-democratic. As
Houzan said, "Perhaps Bush's speeches about bringing
democracy to Iraq made people in the US feel better
about the war. But the US has only replaced Saddam's
secular tyranny with an Islamist tyranny. Iraqi women
are paying the heaviest price for this and genuine
democracy is still a distant dream."

The next two weeks are bracketed by International
Women's Day and the fourth anniversary of the US
invasion of Iraq. Dedicate this period to listening to
Iraqi women like Houzan and you will hear a re-telling
of the Iraq war-one that amplifies the truth that
women's human rights and democratic rights go
hand-in-hand and that the Bush Administration-for all
its talk-has only contempt for both.

Yifat Susskind is communications director of MADRE, an
international women's human rights organization. She
is the author of a book on US foreign policy and
women's human rights and a report on US culpability
for violence against women in Iraq, both forthcoming.