Women are increasingly the victims of violence in Iraq, as direct targets of assassinations and as widows left without support after the deaths of their husbands, an Iraqi women's activist has said.

"Many women activists have been murdered, many women university professors. Many women physicians have been killed, women in the police forces, reporters and journalists," Rajaa al-Khuzai, president of the Iraqi National Council of Women, told a news conference in Vienna Wednesday.

"We are losing an average 100 Iraqi (men) every day ... so I think (we have an additional) 3,000 widows every month... and all of them are young and have no support for them and their families," she added.

Al-Khuzai, a trained gynaecologist, was one of the first women in Iraq's interim Governing Council and was a member of the drafting committee for the new Iraqi constitution.

She then set up the Iraqi Widows Organisation, which promotes women's rights and provides material and other support to mostly young widows, often with children.

"We need to train and educate these young women ... by educating women we are educating all Iraqis," she said, adding her organisation could help secure the future of Iraq.

"If we want to see stability in the region we have to highlight the role of the women ... women who will make the change on the ground," said Edit Schlaffer, chairwoman of the Vienna-based Women Without Borders, which organised the talk.

 

___________________________________________________________________________

Before Saddam Hussein's regime, Iraqi women enjoyed more rights than most of their counterparts in the region and even during the 1980s, "men were involved in the (Iran-Iraq) war and women took over".

"We played the role of the mother and father in the home," she said.

But now "women are very easy targets", especially high-profile women such as herself, Al-Khuzai added.

"We never wander in the streets unless we have many bodyguards. I started with six, then I increased to 12, and then to 20 and then 30," she said.

"We almost imprison ourselves, communicating by email.

Al-Khuzai founded the Iraqi Widows Organisation in January 2004 and with support from the World Bank, started handing out 200-dollar microcredits to young widows.

"So far we have supported about 2,000 widows but we have a long, long waiting list and this waiting list is getting longer every day," she said.

"Now there are so many crimes going on in Iraq, not only terrorists, but insurgents. Tthere are so many militias, 30,000 criminals released by Saddam just before the war and wandering in the streets.

"So every now and then you hear that such person has been kidnapped or been assassinated and this is getting worse and worse every day."