Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Yeah, we got rid of Saddam, but don't worry -- his job responsibilities have been successfully redistributed (with a few modifications).

Then:

Prison guards under Saddam Hussein used to bury detainees alive and watch women as they bathed, occasionally shooting over their heads, a former female prisoner testified Monday in the genocide trial of the ex-president.

Speaking in Kurdish through an Arabic interpreter, the 31-year-old witness recalled what she saw as a 13-year-old girl who was detained during Saddam's offensive against the Kurds in the late 1980s....

A prison warden she identified as Hajaj -- whose name has been given by earlier witnesses in the trial -- "used to drag women, their hands and feet shackled, and leave them in a scorching sun for several hours." ...


Now:

They came for Dr Khaula al-Tallal in a white Opel car after she took a taxi home to the middle class district of Qadissiya in Iraq's holy city of Najaf. She worked for the medical committee that examined patients to assess them for welfare benefit. Crucially, however, she was a woman in a country where being a female professional increasingly invites a death sentence.

As al-Tallal, 50, walked towards her house, one of three men in the Opel stepped out and raked her with bullets....

Iraqis do not like to talk about it much, but there is an understanding of what is going on these days. If a young woman is abducted and murdered without a ransom demand, she has been kidnapped to be raped. Even those raped and released are not necessarily safe: the response of some families to finding that a woman has been raped has been to kill her.

Iraq's women ... die for being a member of the wrong sect and for helping their fellow women. They die for doing jobs that the militants have decreed that they cannot do: for working in hospitals and ministries and universities. They are murdered, too, because they are the softest targets for Iraq's criminal gangs....


You won't be buried alive if you're a Kurd, but you might be raped and killed if you're a working woman.

The march of progress!

(Second link via DU)

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