Perpetuating Patterns of Violence against Iraqi Women

It is not new that Iraqi women live like hostages in a patriarchal society that denies them a multiplicity of rights. In addition to the culture restrictions and norms, the strict religious discourse that imposes a blockade on all women’s movements. More violently, the sectarian (and other) armed conflicts have caused women to be either widowed, bereaved, or captive. After 2003, Iraqi women lost more rights, after a political chaos reigned and supreme religious militias dominated the country. Terrorist organizations emerged in separate regions of Iraq. Despite the set of legislations (only on paper), the political, ideological, and tribal orientation, as well as the backward social conditions that prevailed in the country after the rise of religious parties to power, have all contributed to the women rights’ violations. Women in Iraq suffer from illiteracy, unemployment, and lack of resources to establish or to sustain independency. According to multiple sources, the proportion of illiterate women has become more than 50 percent, after the percentage of educated women was 90 percent during the fifties of the last century. Meanwhile, the participation of Iraqi women in the labor market does not exceed 14.5 percent now.

The worst types of violence have occurred against Iraqi women since 2003 until now, especially in light of the expansion of extremist religious organizations. Between 2003 and 2008, there was a murder campaign that made women confined to homes in terror. Within that campaign, most of the murder victims, who were killed in the most horrific manner, were found dead in the streets after being tortured. Back then, for instance, the women of Basra lived under the sword of armed militias who wanted to subject them to the militia's strict religious ideologies, forcing them to wear the veil and refrain from wearing makeup, and all such kinds of enforcements were driven by tribal mentalities. All this was done in the shadow of the Iraqi government's sectarian silence. Some of the militias that contributed to the killing campaigns against women was the Mahdi Army, and the Thar Allah Movement. Muqtada al-Sadr, the leader of the Sadrist movement and the Mahdi Army, who was televised about hijab, had said that "every hair that appears from a woman's hair will be a fire that stings Al-Hussein, therefore, it is legitimate to threaten and attack every woman who does not conform to wearing the veil." Later, in 2014 and forward, the actions of the terrorist organization ISIS, continued to inflict harm and humiliation on women in Mosul and surrounding territories, as we saw on TV, including the infamous horror against Yazidi women and who were abducted, raped, and traded. On a different level, a pattern of high-profile (educated, liberated, or social media influencers) women's assassination was dominant around the year 2017 and later on.

More recently, since the beginning of the October revolution, the protests in 2019, many Iraqi women activists have been subjected to abduction and murder at the hands of extremist religious groups and parties such as Asa'ib Ahl Al-Haq, Harakat Hezbollah Al-Nujaba, Al-Khorasani and associated groups.

Unfortunately, with all of the ongoing escalating civil unrest in Iraq, women are expected to suffer more, and the future does not seem promising.