What War Brings: death squads

WHAT WAR BRINGS: death squads

In wars and occupations, lots of different people and lots of different groups take up killing other people – for a variety of reasons. One thing these wars and occupations have in common is small groups of men who roam around as a team and kill people off. These men might be locals or foreigners. They might be undercover agents, paid mercenaries, local police, regularly military or government official’s militias.

And it is still happening in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan.

IRAQ

Gunmen broke into the home of a Kurdish policeman earlier this month, and killed his wife and three children as they slept. This happened in Kirkuk, Iraq.

Gunmen kill Iraq police officer’s sleeping family

Omed Abdul-Hamid had already left for work when the gunmen burst into the house and sprayed the woman and children with bullets, police Brig. Gen. Sarhad Qadir said. The children were ages 3 through 10, he said. The attackers did not steal anything, suggesting it was an insurgent attack, Qadir said.

Back in 2005, death squads were running rampant in Iraq. This happened (coincidentally?) after Negroponte showed up to ‘train’ the Iraqi forces. One incident I have blogged about repeatedly – it is the story of Ali Nasir Jabur. One August night in 2005, men wearing Iraqi security forces uniforms raided his home and killed his father, mother, two brothers and a sister. Ali survived by hiding under a blanket. There is a picture of this child at this link.

It was never clear why this happened…or who the killers were. But, I can tell you one thing: I brought this to the attention of every US Senator and all 13 NC Representatives at the time. They all did nothing. Ali’s story is one of tens of thousands of stories. Some of the death squads were ‘terrorists’ and some were Iraqi forces. Some were criminals, and the US and British forces there also acted as death squads. There is more information on that in the book “Winter Soldier”.

There were several journalists who were investigating death squad activity in Iraq, as was the Christian Peacemaker Teams. In a review of Tom Fox’s death, World Prout Assembly cover what Fox was looking into and information about the Wolf Brigade.

Tom Fox, death squads & the dogs of war

The most widely known of these Iraqi commando units is called the Wolf Brigade. The Wolf Brigade is one of several units that have been accused of targeting Palestinian refugees in Iraq, using torture to extract confessions from prisoners, and slaying Sunni clerics. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, the Wolf Brigade is the most feared and effective commando unit in Iraq. They also had this to say about them: Last December (2005), the Wolf Brigade--backed up by the Iraqi army and U.S. military--achieved notoriety after launching a series of counterinsurgency operations in Mosul, a Sunni stronghold northwest of Baghdad. Their popularity was further buoyed by the success of Terrorism in the Grip of Justice, a primetime show on U.S.-funded Al Iraqiya television that features live interrogations of Iraqi insurgents by commandos.

….. Suffice to say, human-rights groups legitimately accuse creators of the counterterrorism television show of violating the Geneva Conventions by publicly humiliating detainees after extracting confessions by torture.

The Christian Peacemaker Teams were not the first people to show an interest in the topic. The allegations of torture, murder, and abuse these people were investigating happened to be the same story investigated by Steve Vincent (New York Time), Yasser Salihee (Knight Ridder) and Fakher Haider (New York Times). All three journalists have this in common: That was the last story these journalists covered before they were killed in Iraq in 2005.

At this time, ‘special forces’ of Iraqis trained by US Army’s Special Forces are operating in Iraq. Here is one story about them, where an Iraqi police sergeant has his home raided by the “dirty brigade” in June 2008. This report was published in June 2009.

Iraq’s New Death Squad

At first he couldn't tell whether the men were Iraqis or Americans. He says he identified himself as a police sergeant, offering his ID before they took his pistol and knocked him to the ground. The men didn't move like any Iraqi forces he'd ever seen. They looked and spoke like his countrymen, but they were wearing American-style uniforms and carrying American weapons with night-vision scopes. They accused him of being a commander in the local militia, the Mahdi Army, before they dragged him off, telling his wife he was "finished." But before they left, they identified themselves. "We are the Special Forces. The dirty brigade," Hassan recalls them saying.

…… On the same night Hassan Mahsan's house was raided, 26-year-old Haidar al-Aibi was killed with a bullet to the forehead. His family says there was no warning.

………. Fathil al-Aibi says the family was awakened around midnight by a nearby explosion. His brother Haidar ran up to the roof to see what had happened and was immediately shot from a nearby rooftop. When Fathil, his brother Hussein and his father, Abbas, tried to bring Haidar downstairs, they were shot at, too. For about two hours he lay lifeless on the roof while his family panicked as red laser beams from rifle scopes danced on their windows. "We had tests the next day at the university," Hussein says. "We didn't think he would go like this."

Right now, the Iraqi Special Operations Forces number around 4,500, but there are plans for more. They are not under the control of the Defense Ministry or the Interior Ministry. Americans pressured the Iraqi government to create a new minister-level office called the “Counter-Terrorism Bureau” and they currently answer directly to Maliki. The perception in Baghdad is that they actually answer to the US military. The US Special Forces do have advisors deeply involved with this group. From the same article as above:

Accusations of human rights abuses, killings and politically motivated arrests have surfaced, including assaults on a university president and arrests of opposition politicians.

….. The effective head of the American ISOF project is General Trombitas of the Iraq National Counter-Terror Transition Team. A towering man with a gray mustache and a wrinkled brow, Trombitas spent nearly seven of his over thirty years in the military training special forces in Colombia, El Salvador and other countries.

I suspect there is quite a lot that remains to be uncovered about the death squads of Iraq, who was running them, who directed them and who paid for them (most likely, the US taxpayers). It is looking very suspicious.

Only thing we know for sure is that the number of contractors used by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan is growing. They now make up about 50% of the total US forces in these wars, and they are not subject to a whole lot of oversight. It is not known how much involvement they have with death squads.

There are no reports of death squads run by al Qaeda in Iraq, but I would not be surprised if they did this too. I would surprised if they did not run death squads.

PAKISTAN

20,000 Pakistani troops went into Swat, part of the North West Frontier Province, last April. This caused a huge refugee crisis, and of course, the death and suffering of many civilians. This was strongly supported (or insisted upon) by Richard Holbrooke and others in the current administration. Here’s how the situation is described in September 2009:

Now, the Pakistani military continues to occupy the area, carrying out a reign of terror in which individuals identified as opponents of the government and the US occupation across the border are being picked up and tortured to death. According to a report published September 15 in the New York Times, with the military occupation of the Swat Valley “a new campaign of fear has taken hold, with scores, perhaps hundreds, of bodies dumped on the streets in what human rights advocates and local residents say is the work of the military.”

AFGHANISTAN

And over in Afghanistan, a report from last year detailed how Australian forces are acting as death squads. It raises the question of the effectiveness of this tactic, in light of the fact that the targets of these assassinations are often identified incorrectly.

Rare insight of SAS operations in Afghanistan

The Defence Department won't say what proportion of these missions involve assassination, nor how many involve simple arrests. But the fact that some insurgents are targeted for killing raises a host of questions about effectiveness and accountability. What happens if the wrong person is killed, if civilians are injured, or the soldiers end up acting on faulty intelligence? Despite those risks, the people who watch the military and their compliance with the laws of war say such missions are definitely legal.

…..Well, obviously, if there are local rivalries, the people who are providing intelligence knowing that Coalition forces will act on that intelligence might want to secure assistance in their rivalries, their feuds, by seeking to create or exacerbate a threat that will then result in a Coalition strike of some kind.

Well, here is the follow up to what happened one night in Afghanistan:

Australian SAS units function as death squads in Afghanistan

The intended target, codenamed "Musket" by the Australian military, was an alleged member of the Islamist Taliban movement. While much of the mission statement remains censored, it is apparent that a squad was sent out to storm into the man's house in the dead of night and execute him in cold blood. The possibility for things to go wrong is inherent in such operations in civilian areas, and on September 17, they went terribly wrong.

I guess you can probably figure out what happened there – they raided the wrong guy, and the locals thought the bullets were coming from the Taliban, and the end result was a couple dead Afghans, and several wounded. Just another night in Afghanistan.

Here’s another one:

Other missions result in massacres. On November 23, 2007, Private Luke Worsley of 4RAR was killed during an assault on a residence in Chenartu village in Uruzgan. Because of the Australian fatality, details of the incident were made public. The target was Taliban leader Mullah Baz Mohammed, who was expected to be at the house that night. Australian troops crept up under the cover of darkness, blew the outer doors off the housing compound and rushed in. They left the Daad family—three men, two women and one female child—dead on the floor. A neighbour, Faiz Mohammed, told Time magazine: "There was blood everywhere." Worsley was shot as he entered the house. Mullah Baz Mohammed was not there.

Not all the death squads in Afghanistan are ISAF troops, however. This article claims that locals are acting as death squads on the orders of foreign intelligence agencies. This spokesperson for the UN claims the death squads are acting outside the law, in contrast to the claim above that SAS operations are within the law.

Afghan death squads ‘acting on foreign orders’

Secret Afghan death squads are acting on the orders of foreign spies and killing civilians inside Afghanistan with impunity, a senior UN envoy has claimed. Professor Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on illegal killings, said "foreign intelligence agencies" had used illegal groups of heavily armed Afghans in raids against suspected insurgents.

…..At the end of a 12-day fact-finding mission to Afghanistan, Professor Alston said: "There have been a large number of raids for which no state or military appears to take responsibility. I have spoken with a large number of people in relation to the operation of foreign intelligence units. I don't want to name them but they are at the most senior level of the relevant places. These forces operate with what appears to be impunity."

These local death squads are operating out of US and British bases in Afghanistan. These killings are done without anyone taking responsibility for them. The evidence points to these death squads being run by US Special Forces or the CIA.

This nothing new. Under the Bush administration, the CIA formed teams of assassins to take out “al Qaeda” although we are not totally sure that those teams were operational. And for all we know, those teams are still around.

Bush’s Hit Teams

Despite the new controversy over whether a global CIA “hit team” ever went operational, there has been public evidence for years that the Bush administration approved “rules of engagement” that permitted executions and targeted killings of suspected insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. In effect, President George W. Bush transformed elite units of the U.S. military – including Special Forces and highly trained sniper teams – into “death squads” with a license to kill unarmed targets on suspicion that they might be a threat to American occupying forces.

The US forces have been acting as death squads in Afghanistan for quite a while. I wrote up a blog post on “Killing the wrong people in Afghanistan” in January 2007.

Maroofa, stands in the doorway where her father and sister were killed during a raid of the U.S military on their home in Darnami village of Mando Zayi district of Khost province, Dec. 12, 2006. Her mother holds a child in the background. (AP Photo/Jason Straziuso).

Afisullah, shows blood stained clothing after a raid by the U.S military on his brother's home in Afghanistan's Darnami village of Mando Zayi district of Khost province in this photo of Dec. 12, 2006. Afisulla's brother Mohammad Jan, an official with the Agriculture Ministry was killed in the raid.

And I suspect al Qaeda and the Taliban have also sent out death squads. I read a news report the other day about the Taliban doing drive-by shootings, but not confirmation of death squads operating.

If you support the continued occupation of Iraq or Afghanistan, or the bombing of Pakistan, then you support WHAT WAR BRINGS: death squads.

Bala Baluk, Afghanistan – May 2009

What War Brings: violence and oppression to gays

Yet another sad aspect of a war and occupation is the violence and suppression of minority groups, particularly religious and sexual minorities. Sometimes it is the occupier who is instigating the violence, sometimes it is other outsiders who bring the violence and oppression, and sometimes it is an internal effect of the war and occupation.

Iraq

Violence against minority groups is rampant in the US occupation of Iraq. It has been directed towards various religious minority groups, especially in the beginning of the occupation. Today, a lot of violence is directed at gays. It has been extremely brutal. This is a report from July 2009.

New wave of violence against Iraqi gays

Iraqi gays are being targeted and killed in what rights campaigners say is some of the worst violence against the community in recent years. At least 68 gay and transgendered men have been killed over the last four months, according to the London-based rights advocacy group Iraqi LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender), bringing the total number of killings of Iraqis because of their sexuality to 678 since 2004. New York-based Human Rights Watch, which recently conducted field investigations on the violence, estimates that hundreds of homosexual men may have been killed in recent months.

This violence goes so far as to post lists of ‘wanted’ men in local neighborhoods. It is believed that the Mehdi army is behind this, although no one has claimed credit. There have been accusations of US soldiers’ involvement in some of the crimes. What we do know is that Iraqi men were routinely picked up by US troops and then detained naked. And we do know that the prisoners at Abu Ghraib were forced to engage in sex acts. This report was from July 2009 and came from a fundraiser event in Lebanon.

US soldiers accused of executing gay Iraqis

The accusations were made by two unnamed, gay Iraqi refugees during a fundraiser event at the Human Rights Campaign headquarters. Several violent images of a beheaded gay Iraqi were shown to the audience by one of the men, who goes by the name “Hussam.” He shocked the audience by claiming U.S. soldiers have also detained and executed Iraqi men perceived to be gay. Images were shown of a U.S. soldier standing over a group of naked men chained together who Hussam claims were gay. Hussam said he possesses images of their execution but did not show them to the audience.

Saddam's rule 'better' for gay Iraqis

There has been so much news of death and destruction from Iraq that the position of sexual minorities is rarely touched on in the mainstream media. But stories of torture and murder of gay Iraqis, particularly men, have been emerging in the gay press for several years.

The torture is extreme, and very sickening. Things were definitely better under Saddam’s rule. Back then, they turned a ‘blind eye’ to any gay events, as long as they did not tangle with Saddam politically. The situation for gay men in Iraq is only getting worse. This report is from September 2009.

How Islamist gangs use internet to track, torture and kill Iraqi gays

Sitting on the floor, wearing traditional Islamic clothes and holding an old notebook, Abu Hamizi, 22, spends at least six hours a day searching internet chatrooms linked to gay websites. He is not looking for new friends, but for victims. "It is the easiest way to find those people who are destroying Islam and who want to dirty the reputation we took centuries to build up," he said. When he finds them, Hamizi arranges for them to be attacked and sometimes killed. Hamizi, a computer science graduate, is at the cutting edge of a new wave of violence against gay men in Iraq. Made up of hardline extremists, Hamizi's group and others like it are believed to be responsible for the deaths of more than 130 gay Iraqi men since the beginning of the year alone.

There are volumes more that could be written about this subject. As far as I can tell in Afghanistan and Pakistan, there is no wide-spread effort to assassinate gays or torture them. There are cases of kidnapping and rape towards young boys in Afghanistan, but that is a case of them being targeted because they are male and young, not because they are gay. I suspect there are problems with the persecution of gays in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but I have not seen any reports of violence and oppression against gays so far.

Photo above: The bodies of gays on the streets of Iraq. Photograph: Bilal Hussein/AP

If you support the continued occupation of Iraq or Afghanistan, or the bombing of Pakistan, then you support WHAT WAR BRINGS: violence and oppression to gays.

Soldiers of Peace trailer (a sign of hope)

Quote:

The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own. ~ Aldous Huxley - English novelist and critic, 1894-1963

Soldiers of peace trailer (a sign of hope)

WWB: violence and oppression to minority religious groups

IRAQ

Violence and terror against Iraq’s minority Christian population has been evident for years. Many have been targeted and killed, many more have fled. This has happened to other minority groups in Iraq also (see yesterday’s posting on violence and oppression to gays). Jews, Yazidis, Palestinians, Shabaks, Mandaeans, Bahia, Armenian, Syriac, and Turkomen have also been targeted by violence, and have abandoned their homeland in large numbers. Kurds are not included in this grouping, mainly because they have not been subject to oppression and violence and displacement. The Jews have fled Iraq, the Palestinians are trapped in refugee camps with no where to go.

Beyond these minorities, the Sunnis of Iraq have largely been ethically cleansed from Baghdad. This is a story in itself, which I covered in an earlier post on What War Brings. Today, I am focusing on the other minorities that have been victims of violence. This is just a small sample of the violence these groups have faced, and the exodus the violence resulted in. In July of this year, there was a series of attacks on churches. Five bombs went off in one day, and there was a targeted assassination. This left five dead and twenty injured, but the most disturbing part is that this came after many years of such attacks.

Christian community faces new wave of violence

A German NGO dealing with vulnerable and threatened communities in Iraq said the attacks were a bid to drive the remaining Christian community out of the country. "Extremist Islamists are systematically aiming at driving out the remaining 100,000 Assyro-Chaldaic Christians from the Iraqi capital," Kamal Sido, a near-east consultant for the Society for Threatened People (GfbV), aid in a statement on 13 July. According to GfbV, more than three-quarters of the approximately 400,000 Christians living in Baghdad have fled the city since the 2003 US-led invasion, due to either direct or indirect threats to their community.

For the most part, the Christians who formerly lived in Iraq fled to Jordan and Syria, just like the majority of other Iraqi refugees.

Iraq was once home to hundreds of thousands of Jews, but most left in the 1950’s. After the invasion of 2003, the few remaining Jews also left, not because of violence and oppression, but as a result of recruitment by Israelis. I think this was a good thing, because Iraq soon descended into violent chaos.

Here is a touching story of the Last Jew of Babylon on You Tube. He went to Israel to look for his old girlfriend who had migrated decades before.

A report released in late December 2008 by the Brookings Institute and the University of Bern (Germany) showed the exodus of minorities from Iraq.

Brookings-University of Bern report on Iraq’s minorities

Estimates On Iraq’s Minorities:

Christians: 2003: 1-1.4 million, Today, 600,000-800,000
Jews: 2003: a few hundred, Today: 10-15
Mandeans: 2003: 30,000, Today: Fewer than 13,000
Palestinians: 2003: 35,000, Today: 15,000
Turkomen: 2003: 800,000 claimed, Today: as few as 200,000
Yazidis: 2003: Not known, Today: around 550,000

……. In October 2008, Christians in Mosul were attacked riving out over 2,000 families. Only one-third has returned since then. As a result of this violence, a large number of each group has been displaced or fled to other countries. The Iraqi Ministry of Displacement and Migration estimates that about half of Iraq’s minorities have left the country. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) believes 30% of Iraqi refugees are minorities. The Mandeans fear that this displacement might mean their end because they won’t be able to find marriage partners. You can only be a member of their religion by being born into it.

The Shabaks, Turkomen, and Yazidis live in the northern part of Iraq, and they have been targeted recently by violence. Two explosions that happened in August 2009 leveled or damaged 65 homes in the village of Khazna.

Minorities trapped in northern Iraq’s Maelstrom

Two explosions, which obliterated a large swath of this village of nearly 10,000 people near the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Monday, killed 34 people and wounded almost 200. The village is inhabited by Shiite Shabaks, a Kurdish-speaking minority. The attack and others like it — including the suicide bombing on Thursday that killed 21 Yazidis in Sinjar, west of Mosul, and a truck bomb in Shirakhan, just north of Mosul, on Aug. 7 that killed 37 Shiite Turkmen — have underscored how vulnerable minorities continue to serve as fodder for a bigger battle under way in northern Iraq.

The civilians are caught in the middle of all the different fractions that are vying for power and have scores to settle. Always, always, it is the civilians who suffer the most when war and occupation come to their country or area. These attacks were not the first, and they probably won’t be the last.

The Mandaens have been especially hard hit in the violence that war and occupation brought to Iraq. They are not in danger of extinction, since they are scattered around the world and can only marry other Mandaens. They are also pacifists, and no one has looked out for their interests.

Disappearing Mandaeans

Nearly 80% of Mandaeans have fled to Syria and Jordan because of the forced conversions, rapes, threats and assassinations they've faced. Often called Gnostics, Mandaens trace their religion back 2,000 years - and its presence in Iraq antedates both Islam and Christianity. Some estimates once put their number at 70,000 within Iraq, but since the war started, that number has dropped to as low as 3,000.

The group “Minority Rights” have made several You Tube videos of Mandaean refugees in Sweden. They are worth watching. One is posted below.

AFGHANISTAN

I have not seen evidence that minority groups are targeted for violence in Afghanistan in the last few years, but there are certainly cases of mistreatment. There were many cases of violence against minorities under the Taliban rule.

Sikh, Hindu minorities of Afghanistan “disappointed, isolated and oppressed”

"Before the war [1979] there were 16,673 Sikh and Hindu families in Kabul, Nangarhar, Ghazni, Khost, Kandahar and Helmand provinces. In the past 30 years we have suffered tremendously and many of our people left the country. "We have too many problems but we get no help to solve them. A lot of our houses, shops and other properties have been seized by powerful people, commanders and warlords. "There are no special schools for our children. We teach them our religion, language and other cultural values at home, but it's not easy and as a result most of our children end up illiterate. "Apart from the two Sikh and Hindu members of parliament in Kabul, we do not have a say in decision-making and have no representation in government.

PAKISTAN

Violence against minorities is really getting going in Pakistan. Just last month, a large gang of people went on an anti-Christian rampage that left eight people dead and houses burned to the ground. Christians make up about 3% of the population of Pakistan.

Pakistan’s Christians protest lack of protection after rampage

After an anti-Christian rampage left eight people dead in the town of Gojra over the weekend, Pakistani authorities arrested 100 people and offered $6,000 in compensation to victims' families in an effort to reassure the country's Christian minority that they will be protected by the law. But their response Monday failed to dampen accusations from Christians that the police neglected to protect them. The attackers in eastern Punjab Province also burned homes to the ground. It was the third attack on Pakistani Christians in the past month, a trend that observers attribute to a rise in extremism and suspicions that local Christians are aligned with the US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Sunni Islamic militants behind these attacks have also targeted Shiites and Ahmadis. Pakistan has had a huge increase in violence towards minorities in the past year, according to group “Minority Rights”. The violence is blamed on religious intolerance coming from religious extremism. The situation keeps getting worse.

If you support the continued occupation of Iraq or Afghanistan, or the bombing of Pakistan, then you support WHAT WAR BRINGS: violence and oppression to minority religious groups.

Yazidi activists speaks

Since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, minority communities, some of whom have lived in the country for more than two millennia, have faced targeted persecution including kidnapping, rape, murder and destruction of homes and businesses, because of their ethnic and religious identities. They form a disproportionate amount of those who have fled to neighbouring countries in Jordan and Syria, and those who have sought refuge further afield. Their very presence as communities in Iraq is now under threat and as they are spread thin across the globe, they face fresh challenges of keeping their families together and their ancient communities, traditions and languages, alive.

What War Brings: widow and abandoned elderly

Photo: The shame of Iraq's pariah widows

BBC News, Baghdad

March 8, 2008

Her husband and three brothers were killed. Her parents were already dead. Her house was burnt down. She was pregnant at the time and lost the baby. But, in the months that followed, Nadia Hussein had to endure much more. Now she lives at a refuge for women in the centre of Baghdad. She spends her days feeding the pigeons and cooking. It's a place for her to escape the many dangers widows face in Iraq.

WHAT WAR BRINGS: widows and abandoned elderly

This post is probably just pointing out the obvious: men get killed the most when wars and occupations come to your hometown, thereby leaving widows behind (and oftentimes orphans, as this post covered).

IRAQ

The years of violence in Iraq lead to a massive increase in the number of widows, and as their numbers increased the ability to help decreased from the breakdown of society. In the past, widows were looked after by extended family, or neighbors or the neighborhood mosque. But those resources were overwhelmed, and the occupying forces did nothing to help the situation. One in eleven women between ages 15 to 80 are estimated to be widows, per the report below from February 2009.

Iraq’s War Widows Face Dire Need With Little Aid

Her twin sisters were killed trying to flee Falluja in 2004. Then her husband was killed by a car bomb in Baghdad just after she had become pregnant. When her own twins were 5 months old, one was killed by an explosive planted in a Baghdad market. Now, Nacham Jaleel Kadim, 23, lives with her remaining daughter in a trailer park for war widows and their families in one of the poorest parts of Iraq’s capital. That makes her one of the lucky ones. The trailer park, called Al Waffa, or “Park of the Grateful,” is among the few aid programs available for Iraq’s estimated 740,000 widows. It houses 750 people.

Another report puts the number of widows between one and two million.

Iraq has million women social time bomb

Moussawi, basing her estimate on a Ministry of Planning report from mid-2007, put the number of divorcees and widows close to 1 million of a total of 8.5 million women aged between 15 and 80. Narmeen Othman, Iraq's acting minister for women's affairs, put the number as high as 2 million in a country of 27 million people. Whatever their number, both parliamentarians say the women who have lost male family members since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq are increasingly lacking the means to provide for themselves.

Iraqi widows yearn for new lives

Nearly three decades of war, brutal totalitarianism, invasion, occupation and insurgency in Iraq have left behind at least a million widows - and several million children without fathers. That was the conservative estimate earlier in 2009 by Iraq's acting minister for women's affairs, Narmeen Othman. She believes there may even be two million widows. Under Saddam Hussein, despite the brutality of his regime towards so many of Iraq's people, war widows were looked after by the state. Now, they are mostly hidden and vulnerable. It's been called Iraq's cultural time bomb.

Most widows end up begging on the streets, or waiting outside mosques for handouts, or can be seen going through garbage. Many are homeless, and many have children. Some have turned to prostitution, or joined up with the insurgents. The article linked above says that only 120,000 Iraqi widows get any kind of state aid. Some are forced into unwanted marriages. The problem seems to be deeper than just poverty. There is also a high level of shame for the widows, and their society’s attitudes about the many widows shows disrespect for their rights.

The shame of Iraq's pariah widows

They accept what has happened to them as the "will of God". Indeed those who campaign on their behalf say one of the hardest things is getting the widows to think that they deserve better lives. "It's not just about legislation," said Hana Adwar, a campaigner for women's rights. "The problem is the way people behave inside the family. The question is how to change attitudes and behaviour towards them."

………There's talk of passing new laws, and finding extra money for the hundreds of thousands of widows. But campaigners say what they need more than anything is more respect in Iraqi society.

Recently, an Iraqi blogger (and friend of mine) decided to do something to help Iraqi widows. She raised some funds to buy four of them sewing machines, so that they can become self-sustaining. She came to my home town (as my guest) and we raised $850. She and her son contributed some more money to achieve this goal. Here is a link to the pictures of what became of the money that was raised and donated locally.

There was a story out today on a program to get Iraqi widows to remarry. Some Iraqis think this is helpful, some say exploitative. The pictures of the widows, along with personal information like the number of children she has, are put into a book where prospective future husbands can look at it. I am not sure if this is a good approach or not, but people do find love in the oddest of ways.

Finding Husbands for Iraq's Widows

Some Iraqi men disagreed with Al Musawi. Fadhil, a man in his mid-30s, said, "We always hear cases of people getting married through Internet sites, so it's not a problem to have a woman's picture showcased in a photo album. "It's better having a man looking after [a] widow instead of leaving her alone, facing hard-life circumstances in Iraq," he added.

I have only run across one story about what has happened to the elderly in Iraq. If there is more than one center to care for them, I do not know about it. I suspect most elderly in Iraq are cared for by their families, but there are probably an awfully high number how have fallen into poverty and homelessness due to the violence that was unleashed by the US invasion.

The abandoned elderly are war’s other victims in Iraq

The guests of the Mercy Home for the Elderly, a residence for indigent senior citizens, come from across Iraq and include Sunnis, Shi’ites, and Christians. Funded by prominent Shi’ite cleric Ayatollah Hussein al-Sadr, the two-story stone building, opened in November 2006, houses 43 men and women who have nowhere else to go.

…… Manager Hadi Hamid Taie says his guests are mostly victims of the violence and economic hard times that followed the American-led invasion six years ago. “This phenomenon is new,’’ Taie says. “According to our religion, it is not permitted to abandon your parents. On the contrary, Islam requires that you take special care of them.’’

The overall population of this home for the elderly has gone done recently, since the violence has gone down and conditions are improving. Some have returned to their families. But people still continue to arrive, due to poverty, instability, and the ongoing violence.

A recent blog post by an Iraqi journalist working for McClatchy’s talked about the need for more homes and services for Iraq’s elderly. The part of the post quoted here deals with homeless elderly who live in the street. This post also describes some recent people who were found living in a cave, in hovels in the desert, or a hand-made shelter made of tires.

Homes for seniors and others

Many old people in Iraq live in the street because the severity of life. Some of them were wealthy and due to circumstances lost their wealth and some are abandoned by their beloveds. Anyhow life obliged them to live in streets as vagrants in rich country like Iraq . It is normal to find such cases in many countries but here in Iraq the new regime came raising the slogan of human rights that were violated during former regime. Six years passed after the collapse, and there are only 5 nursing homes in whole Iraq to taking care of these old people - the same number that was found during Saddam's time.

The problems of the widow and abandoned elderly in Iraq are not being addressed by their government or by the occupation forces. And the same holds true for Afghanistan.

AFGHANISTAN

There are an estimated one and a half to two million war widows in Afghanistan, making the problem much worse than in Iraq. But even less has been reported on these widows. They are living in desperate poverty. None of them get assistance from their government. The chances of re-marriage are slim. This report is from 2007.

Forgotten women turn Kabul into widows’ capital

Every morning Gul, who was widowed when an American bomb hit her house in 2001, leaves her two daughters to go begging on the streets of Kabul. "If I'm lucky, I'll make about 50 afghanis (80p), enough to buy two pieces of bread," she says. Kabul, it is said, is the widows' capital of the world. As many as 50,000 women like Gul live in the city, and many make their home in the abandoned buildings that dot the suburbs, often living in horrific conditions. In a nation with a fractured infrastructure and, at £125 a year, one of the lowest per-capita incomes in the world, many widows are left without relatives able to take them in or offer even modest financial support.

Sometimes they stand outside government buildings with pictures of their deceased husbands. They are ignored. They are ignored by the NATO and US occupation troops, giving lie to the idea that those troops went there to bring freedom or better conditions to women. The following report is from 2008.

Bleak prospects for estimated 1.5 million widows in Afghanistan

Afghanistan has one of the highest numbers of widows (proportionate to the total population) in the world, owing to the armed conflicts that have bedevilled the country for over two decades. There are over 1.5 million widows out of an estimated 26.6 million people in Afghanistan, according to Beyond 9/11, a US-based nonprofit group that provides direct financial support to Afghan widows and their children. Some 50,000-70,000 widows live in Kabul alone, it says.

This report says that about 90% of the widows have children, and the average ago of an Afghan widow is 35 years old. They often have no means of supporting themselves, reducing them to beggars.

The group known as “Beyond 9/11” is quite amazing. I saw a movie about them earlier this year, and their goal is to help Afghan widows become self-sufficient. The group was founded by two women who were made widows from the attack on 9/11.

I could not find any reports on widows in Pakistan. I am sure there are more of them than there were a few years ago. I hope they are getting the help they need.

If you support the continued occupation of Iraq or Afghanistan, or the bombing of Pakistan, then you support WHAT WAR BRINGS: widows and abandoned elderly.

ABJEEZ DemoKracy

How some Pakistanis feel about the US

Pakistani activists of the Islamic fundamentalist party Jamaat-i-Islami shout slogans against the US Kerry-Lugar Bill and drone missile attacks by US in the Pakistani tribal areas, in Karachi on October 2. US President Barack Obama has put Pakistan at the centre of his policy to battle Islamist extremists, many of whom are hiding out in Pakistan's border regions and slipping into Afghanistan.

(AFP/File/Rizwan Tabassum)

In honor of the eight years of stupid war on Afghanistan

A snapshot of how well we are doing in Afghanistan

Afghan photo: Zubaida, an Afghan girl holds her younger sister as she poses for a photograph in Jalalabad, Nangarhar province, east of Kabul, Afghanistan, Wednesday, Oct. 7, 2009. Eight years after the fall of the Taliban, most Afghan children still don't attend school and face the prospect of a life of poverty no different from their parents. Prospects for girls are bleaker. Figures show that only about 13 percent of females over 15 years old can read or write -- compared to 43 percent for males.

(AP Photo/Altaf Qadri)

The Sewing Machine Project

This is a follow up post to the Iraqi Sewing Project that we sponsored here in Asheville in June 2009. But first, here is some background information.

Faiza speaks in Asheville

Faiza gave a presentation last night at Asheville Friends Meeting. We had about 30-35 people show up to hear about what has happened in Iraq and the projects Faiza is working on. One of those projects is the Iraq Sewing project, were she gets sewing machines and materials to widows in Iraq, so that they can become self-sustaining.

Iraq Sewing Project – pictures of the sewing machines and materials

These are pictures of the sewing machines and fabric for the Iraqi Sewing Project and the receipts for these items. There were four sewing machines purchased, along with fabric, scissors, needles and thread.

And the pictures on the blog today are of the women who received the four sewing machines. Earlier this month, Faiza said this to me in an email:

finally the pictures from Misan, where the women are working on the sewing machines we sent.
thank for all donors
Faiza

I am hopefully that we have improved the lives of the members of these four families, and that they now are economically self-sufficient – at least, I hope that is true! I will be making another donation to Faiza later this year (inshallah), so please let me know if you would like to join me.

An apology to the American people

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