BAGHDAD — Noria Khalaf giggled and then,
embarrassed, covered her smile with a fold of her black robes. Yes, she said,
she would like to marry again. It had been four years since her husband died,
and her children needed a father.
Finding a good man in Baghdad these days is a
challenge. Not only is nearly every trailer in this dusty government-run camp
on the capital’s outskirts occupied by war widows like her, with nary a man in
sight, but across Iraq women now outnumber men.
Some widows ask their brothers to bring
friends by the camp, one of two packed trailer camps for widows in Baghdad. But
that is not often successful.
The problem is that widows do not make
appealing brides, say the women themselves and nongovernmental organizations
that assist them.
“Maybe a young woman with only one or two kids
can marry again,” Ms. Khalaf said with a sigh; she has six children.
Widows are not a new social problem in Iraq,
of course. The war with Iran in the 1980s left tens of thousands of women
widowed. Each new calamity that followed created more: the 1991 war with the
United States, the failed Shiite uprising that followed, the repressions
against Kurds.
And the numbers of widows in Iraq, or as
American aid programs prefer to call them, “female heads of households,”
increased substantially after the invasion in 2003 and in the years of violence
that followed.
The Iraqi Ministry of Planning estimates that
about 9 percent of the country’s women, or about 900,000, are widows. A
separate government agency, the Ministry of Women, issued a statement in June
putting the figure at one million.
Other groups also have estimated the number of
women widowed during the nearly nine-year war, which is drawing to an official
close with the last American soldiers scheduled to leave in December.
A United Nations report estimated that at the
peak of the sectarian violence in 2006, nearly 100 women were widowed each day.
The Ministry of Social Affairs pays widow’s benefits to 86,000 women, most of
whom, it says, lost their husbands in the latest war.
This figure corresponds with conservative
estimates of 103,000 to 113,000 Iraqi deaths in the war, according to a
nonprofit group that tallies casualties, Iraq Body Count. The
count includes the estimated 10,000 Iraqi soldiers who died in the initial
American-led invasion and 10,125 police officers and soldiers who died
afterward in fighting with insurgents, along with those killed in sectarian
violence.
In possibly one of the last such episodes of
the war, last weekend, the Iraqi police said American troops shot and killed
two civilians after a roadside bomb exploded near a convoy. The American
military denied that soldiers had fired on civilians.
Confronted with so many widows, the Iraqi
government is providing only minimal assistance, equivalent to about $80 a
month to those widowed in the recent conflict.
“We expected we would get a lot of help from
all sides, the Americans, the Iraqi government,” Ms. Khalaf, who lost her
husband in 2007, said in an interview in her trailer. “But the fact is, nobody
really cares about us.”
The rusting trailer camp, across from a car
lot, represents a social challenge that is not easily remedied — not least
because the gender imbalance makes it exceedingly unlikely most widows will
remarry.
Some American-financed projects have sought to
help widows become self-sufficient economically, with some success, according
to program reports. A United States Agency for International Development
program offers small grants to female heads of households, for example. They
can use the money to open small businesses like beauty salons or catering
services. Program administrators say many recipients not only have improved
their lives materially, but have overcome depression.
The program noted ailments among widows, some
of whom had witnessed the killings of their husbands, like difficulty
concentrating, numbness and heart palpitations. But after the widows started a
small business, the program administrators said, they noticed signs of
improvement — “more colorful clothing, smiley faces and for some, louder voices
as they speak.”
At the trailer camp, American soldiers used to
drive by occasionally in their Humvees, to throw candy and soccer balls to the
children, a meager help.
At times, war widows became symbols for
opponents of the American military presence in Iraq. When an Iraqi journalist threw his
shoes at President George W. Bush in 2008, he shouted that he was
doing so on behalf of the war’s widows and orphans. Politicians have recruited
widows to appear at political rallies. But a half a dozen widows interviewed at
the trailer camp said, most of all, they would like to remarry, however
unlikely.
In the meantime, Raja Hashim, 32, said she
would focus on her children, all sons. “I don’t need a man because I have three
men already,” she said.
Yasir Ghazi contributed reporting.