When the United States penetrated Baghdad with its first bombing campaign of The War on Terror on March 19, 2003, Yanar Mohammed knew that her life as an architect was over. Something more important had come up.
Touting war slogans like, “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” and promising Iraq its liberation from Saddam Hussein’s tyrannical rule, President Bush ordered bombs to reign down on Baghdad. Mohammed watched the scene’s live feed from her television set in Toronto, where she’s lived since 1995, horrified.
And then she did the unthinkable.
While frightened citizens wealthy enough to flee Baghdad fled for their lives, Mohammed went back.
She now spends more than half of each year in a chaotic, war-torn country where basic survival isn’t guaranteed to any citizen, anywhere, anytime. Mohamed is more than an every day citizen, though. She’s a self- proclaimed progressive, international activist with a master’s degree in a religiously fundamentalist country.
In other words, she’s a moving target. But she knows that.
“If they want to come and get us, they will come and get us,” said Mohammed. “It’s not safe at all to do what we’re doing. But if we don’t do it, nobody will and we’re going to turn into another Afghanistan under the Taliban. So we find ourselves playing a major role in resisting the Afghanization of Iraq.”
Mohammed, who spoke at USM Oct. 11, is soft spoken and gentle, though she spends most of her days confronting the horrors of war, counseling women who’ve seen the worst of it through war crimes unpunishible in a lawless land.
“The violence against women has been used as a tool of vengeance between the two kinds of militias,” she said. “Women of Iraq used to live better off in the past decade. At this point we’re going through a change in every detail in our lives, not just because of the militarization of our country, but also because of the political Islamicization of our country, in a way that let go of our rights.”
She wants those rights back, and she wants them now. But progressive change is difficult in the midst of a war.
Mohammed makes a living standing up to insurgents and religious warlords. She’s the president of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), a non-government organization, as well as the editor of a Baghdad newspaper named Al Mousawat, or, “Equality” in English.
The OWFI is an underground railroad of sorts, providing shelter for women who’ve been raped, prostituted or threatened with honor killings, which are dramatically on the rise, according to Human Rights Watch (HWR), though statistics are unavailable due to the fragmented state of police stations.
Honor killings have become increasingly common, as militias battle to prove their superiority over one another with messages unmistakably clear: we killed your women, we rule this region.
It’s for this reason that Mohammed’s secretly located shelters are never occupied for more than one year at a time before quietly moving from one location to the next to avoid being targeted.
In Iraq these days, nobody is safe.
In the year’s since the US occupation of Iraq, Mohammed has watched civil society unravel. She describes waking up every morning to an alarm clock impossible to shut off: explosions. The early morning hour of 8:00 a.m. is a favorite time for suicide bombers, she said.
No longer afraid of the brutal tactics Hussein’s Baath party employed to squash rebellions, scores of religious militias have organized, extinguishing any type of civil law that existed in Iraq-including the basic human rights of Iraqi women.
Though Mohammed doesn’t wish him back, she notes with a sense of nostalgia that Hussein did vie for economic success and placed a premium on the education of his citizens, including women. Literacy classes were even mandated for adults, and enforced through a possible three-year jail sentence if disobeyed.
When Hussein was brought down, so was any semblance of functioning government, education, and policing systems. Hussein provided, if nothing else, stability to a region divided among ethnic lines. For decades, Iraq had embodied a comparatively progressive middle-eastern country. Women enjoyed a free education, equal wages in the workforce and were not required by law to wear the veil.
“We used to have a government, before this occupation, that was very functional and was in full control of all of the country and of security,” said Mohammed. “After March 2003, the formula has totally changed.”
Life in general has changed in Iraq since 47-year-old Mohammed last lived there, from her birth in 1960 until she left for Canada in 1995 with her (now) ex-husband and teenage son. Many of her family members still live in Iraq, though they’ve fled Baghdad.
During her talk at USM, Mohammed showed a picture of Baghdad University graduates on graduation day in 1963 wearing mini-skirts, make-up and smiles.
That has changed now. Graduation day may warrant smiles, but they aren’t visible under the now mandated veil.
The veils women must wear come in various colors and cloths depending on the religious sect which claims them; a visible expression of the male’s ownership and subsequent power in that region. The punishment for not wearing the veil depends on the region, but includes being beaten, spit on, or raped.
But oppressive dress codes aren’t the only changes in Iraq Mohammed sees as detrimental to women.
Rather than playing a meaningful role in society as they’ve enjoyed for years, Mohammed says that women are now being used as a commodity to gain power.
Many women in Iraq now fear even leaving the home for safety reasons. Mohammed, though vigilant, doesn’t hide her identity. She’s recently been featured on television in Iraq condemning the veil, and even burns it in a picture on her website.
Although Mohammed is a public figure, the shelters she runs remain unmarked, and have yet to hang signs on the doors for fear of targeted attacks.
She’s careful not to sound wistful for life under Hussein’s rule, but within a conversation she often brings up the way life used to be.
Though she wants honor killings, rapes and veiling to end, she notes that the end to oppression will only last if the problem is cured at its core. She describes the current state of affairs in Iraq as “barbaric.”
The revival of tribal mentalities in Iraq has made women’s realities worse than they’ve been in years, though they’ve been on the decline since 1991’s post-Gulf War economic sanctions imposed by the US and the UN. Since that time and accelerated since occupation, Islamic law has made its way back into the political arena as a resistance to Western ways.
“The root lies in the constitution,” she said. “And right now we have a government that is fundamentalist, that is divided and supports these militias.”
And that’s not an easy problem to solve.
Mohammed sees the political implementation of Sharia (Islamic) law as the greatest obstacle facing Iraqi women today. She says that while religious rights are important, they should be clearly separated from politics.
“The Sharia should not be the replacement of the Civil Laws. When the US invasion took place they preferred that the Iraqi’s be represented by their religion and according to their sect of the religion,” Mohammed said. “The leaders that are sitting in the parliament are the new war lords of Iraq.”
Rape, kidnappings and honor killings are compounded by the fact that Iraq’s policing capabilities are mainly dismantled or corrupt. Even when reports are made to the police-which isn’t often out of shame and fear-they are largely ignored, Mohammed said. She recalled going to a police station where she demanded punishment for six officers who had allegedly committed rape on women she knew in prison.
“Where are these officers?” Mohammed remembers asking. “We counted six names, we told them these officers have raped women in the prison and we want them taken to court, where are they?”
Nothing was ever done.
The increase in sectarian violence has rendered law and order impossible, resulting in an increase in crimes against women among other problems.
In all of the warfare, sometimes living in an occupied territory becomes overwhelmingly frustrating. Mohammed recalls an organized protest she held where an American troop asked her if she had a permit to demonstrate, then demanded they stop for not possessing one.
“Sometimes you get upset and outraged and I said ‘Show me your permission, who permitted you to come into our country?'” Mohammed said. “‘You brought a military machine into my country but you don’t want me to protest that women should not be abducted?”‘
Though she’s received personal death threats for her efforts, they don’t deter her. Their only evident effect is constantly moving from one apartment to another when she’s in Iraq, staying for no more than one month at a time; her address kept unknown to all and absolutely no guests. It’s simply too dangerous.
Despite the death threats, the regular suicide bombs, and military and state resistance to Mohammed’s attempts at reform she remains optimistic for the future. Her speech at USM and continued press appearances internationally is arguably her best tool for ending the re-oppression of Iraqi women.
“We have a constitution that has taken all the women’s rights,” said Mohammed. “But you cannot keep on combating by rhetoric, you have to organize a movement and the best way to organize such a movement is to recruit and organize around the issues.”
Mohammed has started organizing freedom spaces. They’ve had seven sessions so far, and Iraqi youth have started attending in high numbers, especially those from heavily Islamic areas of Iraq.
“Freedom Space 1” boasted 25 people, while the most recent “Freedom Space 7” saw 200. It’s a safe space for people of all backgrounds including Sunni, Shiites, Kurds, and Christians to come and share in the joys of life, often forgotten in times of war.
They share literature-namely poetry-and talk about love, hope, life, and suffering, but mostly the need to change the current society. It may be the only place in Iraq where religion doesn’t matter.
“Ethnicity cannot divide us,” Mohammed said. “Humanity echoes, whether in Iraq or the US.”