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TechnoratiIraqi Widows, Orphans Left Stranded
The car exploded near a popular ice cream parlor, sending flames and shrapnel through the busy square and killing 17 people.
It was another deadly explosion quickly forgotten by the outside world. But Aug. 1, 2007, changed the life of 28-year-old Maysa Sharif. It was the day she became one of nearly a million Iraqi women who have lost husbands as the country has suffered through three wars and Saddam Hussein's murderous regime.
Such vast numbers of widows would tax any society, and all the more Iraq's. With virtually no safety net and few job opportunities, most widows have little choice but to move in with their extended families and depend on their largesse.
Sharif was five months pregnant and preparing breakfast for her children when the blast shook their house in central Baghdad. She ran to the scene where her 39-year-old husband, Hussein Abdul-Hassan, ran a cigarette kiosk, and saw him on the ground. "Shrapnel hit his body and his head was cracked open. His eyes and mouth also were open," she said.
"I wanted to close them," she said, but police dragged her away, fearing a second explosion.
And her nightmare continued. Her 7-year-old son Saif had gone to work with his dad, and she couldn't find him. Only as her husband was being taken to the holy city of Najaf to be buried did she learn her son had died in the hospital.
"The funeral convoy turned around and put Saif's body in the same coffin," she said. "They refused to let me see my son or go to Najaf because I was pregnant. I could not believe that he was dead until I saw the death certificate."
Sharif has three other children - 10-year-old Ali, 2-year-old Tabarak and infant Abdullah, whose name was chosen by his father the night before he was killed. They now live in one room set aside for them in her brother-in-law's compound in central Baghdad.
With the government's attention focused on political crises and the U.S.-led war now entering its sixth year, advocates say the plight of women like Sharif is being ignored.
Women's Affairs Minister Nirmeen Othman warns it could boil up into a peacetime "social crisis."
A family health survey provided by lawmaker Samira al-Moussawi, who champions the widows, counted 738,240 widows ranging in age from 15 to 80 as of January 2007, and dating back to the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. The figure included those whose husbands died of natural causes and a further breakdown was not available.
Othman estimated the number at closer to 1.3 million.
The problem also threatens the next generation.
A whole new primary school for 640 orphans has opened in Baghdad's Sadr City district, but headmistress Asma Karim says many pupils are failing for lack of support at home.
"Those who are left to care for these children are normally concerned about their survival more than their education," she said.
Al-Moussawi, a geologist-turned-politician, says she has been overwhelmed by petitions for help, including 448 recently delivered to her office in a plastic bag from the predominantly Shiite southern city of Diwaniyah.
"There isn't any strategy, any clear strategy to deal with this social issue - not for women, not for children," she said.
She has proposed legislation to budget $1 million - a tiny fraction of the oil-rich country's $48 billion budget - for educating widows, teaching them skills and raising their tiny pensions. But the Cabinet has rejected the measure.
Umm Hiba, a 38-year-old mother of two in northern Baghdad, blames herself for her husband's death because she sent him to a Baghdad market to buy yogurt for the dinner she was cooking. A mortar attack killed him on Jan. 27, 2007.
"It was all my fault. If I did not send him, he would be alive now with his children," she said, crying as she held her 2-year-old son.
Now she lives with her 7-year-old daughter and 2-year-old son in a room in the back of the house she and her husband shared with her blind brother-in-law and his family. She has built a makeshift bathroom and kitchen.
Neighbors and relatives collected money for her husband's funeral, but she was forced to sell her furniture to buy a sheep to slaughter on the first anniversary of his death, according to Islamic tradition. The sheep cost more than her monthly $62 pension.
Umm Hiba, who would only give her nickname, which means "mother of Hiba," says she applied unsuccessfully for several jobs but was rejected. She could have sought work as a cleaner in a school, but refused. "I have a high-school degree so it would be shameful for me to take such a job," she said.
The pension, she said, can't keep up with soaring food and clothes prices. "In Iraq, everything is costly, except human beings who are very cheap," she said.
By comparison, war widows under Saddam received plots of land, the cost of the funeral and sufficient pensions.
Jalila Hassan's husband, Kadhum Mohammed was 29 when he was killed in 1984 while fighting in the Iran-Iraq war. She was 17 at the time and said she was given a pension and even offered a choice between a car or the equivalent price. She chose the cash.
"Back then, widows were taken care of better than they are now. We were not left in destitution," she said.
Hassan, who lives with her mother and brothers in Sadr City, still gets a slightly higher pension of $80 a month but its value has fallen sharply.
Afifa Hussein's husband, 58-year-old Uraibi Hamid, was snatched by masked gunmen and shot to death July 14 in the insurgent stronghold of Samarra.
Hussein, in her 40s with eight children, found herself struggling to care for two disabled sons and an ailing daughter. To earn extra money for the family, her 19-year-old son drove a cab, a dangerous occupation in Iraq these days.
Her teenage daughter quit school, unable to cope, and a traumatized son moved out of the house for a month to stay with relatives.
Badriyah Hamid, a 45-year-old Shiite cleaning woman with 10 children, was working late at a school in the predominantly Sunni village of Rashidiyah on May 23, 2007, when she learned her 55-year-old husband, Fadhil Jafar, had been shot to death and dumped on the street.
"I ran to the site and all my children came too, throwing themselves on his body. He was shot six times in his back and head," she said.
The killing left one of her sons with a form of amnesia and no longer able to read or write, causing him to fail in school.
But Hamid, a strong-willed Kurdish woman, is struggling to manage on her own.
She moved in with her husband's family but became worried they would try to force her daughters to marry their sons. So with rent money donated by a neighbor, she moved into a two-room house with all her children.
She finds occasional work as a cleaner but still has to scavenge for scraps of food at a nearby market. She worries that without a father, her children will fall victim to drug traffickers or other bad influences.
"My husband was everything in my life. Without him, life is extremely difficult because no one can help us and no one can fill the gap he left," she said. "But besides the financial burdens on my shoulders, I have to care about the morality of my children and protect them from the evils of society."
© 2008 Associated Press
9 Comments so far
Show AllDidn't we all read the Kim Gamel and Bushra Juhi in Sunday's paper!
RE - By comparison, war widows under Saddam received plots of land, the cost of the funeral and sufficient pensions.
You know that you are doing less than nothing when you are compared unfavorably to Saddam.
Of course, an impoverished underclass of widows and orphans will eventually provide the invading forces with their much wanted "Comfort Women."
So far, family helps family a certain amount. But where there is no family, one can be "recruited" into one.
Compassion wins "hearts and minds" more efficiently than force.
What about the 10 year old looking after her siblings in Afghanistan?
War makes girl, 10, mom of the family
By: James McCarten
April 4, 2008, WPG Free Press
KANDAHAR PROVINCE, Afghanistan -- From down a dusty path reputed to be the second-most dangerous road in the world, a heart-wrenching sight emerged to greet Canadian soldiers Thursday -- a group of orphaned children led by a girl of no more than 10 came in search of medical care.
The girl, an emerald-green scarf around her head, carried a toddler in her arms as they made their way tentatively toward a police substation manned by Canadian soldiers and Afghan police officers, in the heart of the treacherous Panjwaii district, birthplace of the Taliban.
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Afghan orphans wait for treatment at a police post in Afghanistan yesterday. (James Mccarten / The Canadian Press )
Details of their background were sketchy at best, but interpreters said they walked nearly two hours over perilous terrain in search of help, said Sgt. Mike McKay, from Bravo Company, 2 Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, based in Edmonton.
Both of their parents are dead and the kids live with a "deranged" uncle who doesn't provide much care, said McKay, 37, from Winnipeg.
"For me, it's heartbreaking," he said. "There's a 10-year-old girl who's living what's probably the hardest lesson in life: you're the oldest one, you're now in charge."
The children sat down at the edge of a stretch of razor wire as police and soldiers gathered to inspect the patient: a boy of about five, his almost hairless scalp red with patches of infected skin.
Cpl. Robert Gould, a medic with A Company, 3 Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, also based in Edmonton, happened to be travelling in one of the many patrols that grind up and down the road, popular with insurgents seeking to plant improvised explosive devices.
"Tell him this is going to burn a little," Gould told an interpreter as he cleaned the festering sores with alcohol before applying antiseptic ointment and gauze bandages.
Gould, 23, from Peterborough, Ont., said the children had been to the sub-station before, hoping for some form of treatment and whatever charity they could scrounge.
The entire procedure took only a few minutes but could well end up preventing the infection from becoming even more serious or even life-threatening, he added.
Plus, such gestures might one day bear fruit, Gould said.
"If all they've been taught is to hate, then that's what they're going to do, they're going to hate," he said.
"If we just keep shooing them away and shooing them away, if people get tired of seeing them here, if you're going to play that game, that has relevant factors down the road, not just for us, but for everyone else."
Afghanistan, a country ravaged by decades of war and centuries of poverty, had an estimated 1.6 million orphaned children out of a population of about 26 million in 2005, according to UNICEF statistics.
It also ranks third in the world in countries where a child is most likely to die before the age of five; there were 257,000 such deaths in 2006. The average life span in Afghanistan is just 43 years.
One interpreter tried to convince the soldiers to take the children into Kandahar city, where they would have access to local orphanage facilities and aid agencies.
But the military can't be seen to be ferrying orphans across Afghanistan, McKay said.
"The children are the victims in this whole mess," McKay said.
"At 10, she's not a mom. In Canada, 10-year-olds are playing with Barbies and on a swing and stuff like that, and she's already taking responsibility for being a mother."
About an hour later, McKay returned to the substation gate to find the children still sitting in the same spot, clearly unsure of whether to begin their long, dangerous trek home.
"I think we should set up an orphanage ourselves," he said, straight-faced and gesturing to one of the many deserted mud-walled compounds that line the road throughout Panjwaii.
It would be a project in homage, he joked, to the kind-hearted American padre from the television show MASH whose focus was always on the orphaned victims of the Korean War.
"I could be Father Mulcahy."
-- The Canadian Press
Could Saddam Hussein been so terrible that it warrants measures like this??????? I blame George W Bush and his cohorts for all the misery, death and destruction. I don't know how these neocon's sleep at night knowing what they have done to innocent people? I guess it's easy when you don't have any more of a conscious that than average conservative does! I don't believe there is a one of them who has a gram of morals or ethics. I am so sick of Republican's I don't think I will ever vote for another one as long as I live. They are a sick group of puppies!
In Republican circles women are good for wives to give cover for their real (gay, pedophile etc.) sex life, or whores to discredit Democrats. In Iraq they don't seem to have a purpose yet - so they will just have to die.
This article makes me so furious I'd like to spit. What did those women and children ever do to us to deserve this?
Why can't Congress pay attention to everything coming out of Iraq and do something more than yap about it?
We don't want this war! We don't want innocents suffering! Don't you get it?
Tell Petraeus tomorrow that it's time to pack it in, not start something else in Iran. His "stratagies" are not working! They haven't worked in five years, and they won't work in fifty!
So the AP put this story out on the wire, how many of the corrupt corporate media chose to run it? Ignorance is bliss.
We are supporting a corrupt Iraq government that we installed that is killing it's own people and could care less about it's children. It's making Saddham look benign.
The American public know more about American Idol - whatever the Hell that is - than they do about what we are doing to the other citizens of the world.
We're going to get what we deserve. I'm sorry to say it because our children don't deserve it, but it's true.
kathyodat
Now is the time for America to end the ban on Cannibas and put its 25000+ industrial uses to work. Do that and more Americans will wake up and force our corrupt politicians to end the occupation in Iraq. In addition, solar, wind, and geothermal will be even easier to produce and sustain since you'll no longer need fossil fuels. So you have two choices:
1. Keep reading these sad stories and sit there.
2. Be a winner and cut down the number of sad stories down by overturning the ban on Cannibas and getting those alternative renewables in motion.
No matter where you live, it's hard to detect someone planting a bomb. Iraq is proof!
It's good to have true friends who don't want to see harm come to you!
America, how could you? How-absolutely- could-you?
Every day this White House gives me something else to be ashamed of. Something else to grieve over.
These are our darkest days as a country. The people in the White House need to stand trial for War Crimes; Crimes Against humanity. I and others like me will not stop until justice is served. They will stand trial. Period.