WUNRN
Global Fund for Women
June 24, 2014: Young men armed with assault rifles
went door to door in Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq, taking "women
who are not owned" for "Jihad Nikah" or sex Jihad.
Between July 9th and July 12th, women’s rights activists documented 13 cases of
women who were kidnapped and raped by militants of the Islamic State of Iraq
and Syria (ISIS) or DA’ESH, the Arabic shorthand for the
group’s name. Of the 13 women, four of them committed
suicide because they couldn’t stand the shame. One woman’s brother committed
suicide because he could not bear the fact that he was unable to protect his
sister.
This is just one account of the extreme violence in
Iraq since the Sunni DA’ESH militants have seized control
over large portions of the country over the past three weeks.
“Women are being taken in broad daylight,” said Yanar Mohammad, Co-Founder and President of Global Fund for Women grantee partner Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq. "Men have the weapons to do whatever they want and their [DA’ESH] way of dealing with things is to kill."
Being a woman in Iraq was difficult before
the conflict and now military leaders are handing guns to young untrained,
undereducated and unemployed Shia men. These men are promised big salaries if
they leave their homes to fight, according to an anonymous Global Fund ally in
Baghdad.
With a death toll of 1,000 and rising in
only three weeks, the sectarian conflict has forced most women’s rights
organizations to scale back their programs. Organization of Women’s Freedom in
Iraq was in the middle of a campaign against Article 79 of the Jaafari Personal
Status Law, a law which, among other women’s rights violations, would grant
custody over any child two years or older to the father in divorce cases, lower
the marriage age to nine for girls and 15 for boys, and even open the door for
girls younger than nine to be married with a parent’s approval. Now, it takes
everything they have to keep their shelters open and women
safe.
"We cannot speak of women’s rights now unless
we are speaking of the livelihood of those who are totally jeopardized, such as
women who lost families and young girls who are vulnerable to corrupt officials
or clerics,” said Yanar. “We went from legal work and improving rights of women
to working in a state of emergency and trying to find the lowest chain in
society and get them to safety."
The extreme sectarian violence is a relatively new
phenomenon in Iraq, taking up speed during the U.S. invasion in 2003,
reflects Yanar, who is "sick and tired" of western pundits on TV
saying there is no hope for Iraq.
"Mainstream media trashing Iraqi people is
unbearable and is a total manipulation of the facts of America’s role in
dividing Iraqi people,” said Yanar. “The political process that the US
government put in place is a total failure and they [US] just left. The damage
is not on them, it’s on us now."
The damage comes in the form of, among others, a
generation that didn’t have access to education.
"This generation listens to whatever the
clerics and politicians say," said Yanar. "They are ready to throw
themselves in the fire and they do it in the name of their Imam...Both
politicians and religious heads are pushing the country into a very sectarian
divide and it’s frightening."
As the fighting intensifies in northern and western
Iraq, over 300,000 have already fled to the Kurdish region for
safety, where UNHCR and other relief organizations set up a refugee camp in the
arid region of Khazer.
"It is very hot and there is no water; we were
not prepared for this influx of refugees,” says a Global Fund ally in Erbil, a
city in Kurdistan. “The situation is by no means sustainable. The majority has
nowhere to go and is staying in parks. Entire families are left without the
most basic of shelters, food and clothes.
"While these waves of displacement to Kurdistan
includes Shias, Sunnis, and Christian families, the pressure on Iraqi
Christians have been strongest due to DA’ESH’s infamous brutality.
"Christian women in the areas controlled by
DA’ESH are forced to wear hijab or face death," said a Global Fund ally
who lives in Baghdad. "They must pay a protection tax, or ‘jizyah’ to DA’ESH to stay safe."
If the violence is not seriously addressed, our ally
in Erbil says Iraqi women know exactly what is going to happen next because
they have endured it over and over again since the U.S. invasion in 2003, and
during the first and second Gulf War.
"We know what has happened to women in Iraq – a lot of murders and violations – and we have already suffered to an unbearable extent," said Global Fund ally in Erbil. "There is nothing they haven’t done to us; which is why panic spreads among women as soon as we hear of another crisis. Women are used as a weapon for retaliation."