mARCH 9, 2007

UNITED NATIONS (IPS) — Amid the chaos and violence of U.S.-occupied Iraq, the significance of widespread gender-based violence has been largely overlooked, according to a groundbreaking report released here by MADRE, an internationally active women's human rights organization.

Iraqi women are enduring unprecedented levels of assault in the public sphere, including widespread abductions, public beatings, death threats, sexual assaults, honor killings, domestic abuse, torture in detention, beheadings, shootings and public hangings, said the report titled "Promising Democracy, Imposing Theocracy: Gender-Based Violence and the U.S. War on Iraq".

"Women are not only being targeted because they are members of the civilian population, women — in particular those who are perceived to pose a challenge to the political aspirations of their attackers — have increasingly been targeted simply because they are women," said Houzan Mahmoud, a representative of the Organization for Women's Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), at a panel discussion here that coincided with the report's launch.

"Before the U.S. occupation, Iraq was a dictatorship, it was not perfect, but there was security, women could go to work, could go out," Mahmoud told IPS.

"What little protections for women there were before the occupation are now gone," she stressed.

Mahmoud's work with the non-governmental organization OWFI to foster women's rights and help victims of abuse has resulted in the jihadist group Ansar al-Islam placing a "fatwa" on her. They have called for her death.

The report documents the use of systematic gender-based violence by Iraqi Islamists, brought to power by the U.S. overthrow of Iraq's secular Ba'ath regime, and highlights the role of the U.S. in fomenting the human rights crisis confronting Iraqi women today.

"Contrary to its rhetoric and its legal obligations under the Hague and Geneva Conventions, the (George W.) Bush administration has refused to protect women's human rights in Iraq. In fact, it has decisively traded women's rights for cooperation from the Islamists whom it boosted to power," said Yifat Susskind , MADRE communications director and author of the report.

Like religious fundamentalists in the U.S. and elsewhere, Iraq's Islamists see the subordination of women as a top priority — both a microcosm and a precondition of the social order they wish to establish. As in Iran, Algeria, and Afghanistan, a campaign of violence against women was the first salvo in the Islamists' war to establish a theocracy in Iraq, the report says.

The U.N. and the internationally recognized human rights watchdog Amnesty International have documented that attacks on women began just weeks after the U.S. invasion in 2003.

U.S. authorities took no steps to stop the violence, and soon the attacks spread, according to Mahmoud.

Following the incidents of abuse and torture at the U.S.-managed Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, "to date only 11 junior U.S. soldiers have been prosecuted," according to Jennifer Green, senior staff attorney at the New York based Centre for Constitutional Rights (CCR).

The U.S. has set the example that "there will be no high-level accountability for actions in detention facilities," Green stressed.

Within a year after the U.S. occupation, Islamists were killing Iraqi artists, intellectuals, professionals, ethnic and religious minorities, lesbians and gays, according to the report.

"Today there is a virtual witch hunt for gays, lesbians and trans-gendered people," according to Susskind.

"Gender-based violence extends beyond women to anyone who the Islamists perceive as not conforming to their agenda," she explained.

However, women, who are seen as the carriers of group identity, have remained in the cross-hairs of Iraq's warring sectarian militias, according to the report.

Iraqi women's organizations report that militias "are taking revenge on each other by raping women," and targeting Christian women with rape and assassination as part of a broader attack on that community.

Women have been systematically attacked by theocratic militias on both sides of the sectarian divide, but the most widespread violence has been committed by the Shi'a militias affiliated with the U.S.-backed government — the Badr Brigade and Mahdi Army, according to Susskind.

These groups have waged their campaign of terror against women with weapons, training, and money provided by the U.S. under a policy called the "Salvador Option," according to MADRE.

The "Salvador Option" is a reference to the military assistance program of the 1980s, initiated under Jimmy Carter and subsequently pursued by the Ronald Reagan administration, in which the U.S. trained and materially supported the Salvadoran military in its counter-insurgency campaign against popularly supported FMLN guerrillas.

Over 75,000 Salvadorans — primarily civilians — died during the 1980s as a result of state repression of the FMLN guerillas and their sympathizers, according to the U.N.

Ironically, after the impending withdrawal of Britain from Iraq, El Salvador will be one of the U.S.'s major partners in the occupation, with about 400 soldiers in the country.

Unfortunately, neither the mainstream press, the alternative media, nor the anti-war movement has identified the connections between the attack on Iraqi women and the spiraling violence that has culminated in civil war, according to MADRE.

But, violence against women is not incidental to Iraq's mounting civilian death toll and civil war — it is a key to understanding the wider crisis. Indeed, the twin crises plaguing Iraqi civilians — gender based violence and civil war — are deeply intertwined, the report said.

For example, in the legal arena, the same provisions of the U.S.-brokered constitution that codify gender discrimination — Articles 39 and 41 — also lay the groundwork for sectarian violence. These articles establish separate laws on the basis of sex and religious affiliation, according to the report.

Speakers at the launch stressed that the report's re-telling of the Iraq war from the perspective of Iraqi women illuminates the strong links between women's human rights and democratic rights — two things they allege the U.S. is ignoring in Iraq.