Iraq analysis

[Al-khiyal]

Iraq suicide bomber kills three soldiers in Mosul

MOSUL, January 27, 2009 (AFP)--A suicide bomber killed three Iraqi soldiers and injured three others Tuesday when he rammed his explosives-laden car into an army patrol in northern Iraq, police said.

The attack occurred in early afternoon in the Al-Maliya district of the city of Mosul, north of Baghdad, according to local police commander Ahmed al-Jaaburi.

The U.S. military considers Mosul, Iraq's second largest city, to be the last urban stronghold of Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

The incident comes amid fears of a spike in violence as Iraq prepares for its first polls in four years.

Nineveh Province, of which Mosul is the capital, has 454 candidates vying for election - the lowest number of candidates among the 14 Iraqi provinces voting January 31.

[Al-khiyal]

What Kind of Liberation? : Women and the Occupation of Iraq by Nadje al-Ali and Nicola Pratt

In the run-up to war in Iraq, the Bush administration assured the world that America's interest was in liberation — especially for women. The first book to examine how Iraqi women have fared since the invasion, What Kind of Liberation? reports from the heart of the war zone with dire news of scarce resources, growing unemployment, violence, and seclusion. Moreover, the book exposes the gap between rhetoric that placed women center stage and the present reality of their diminishing roles in the "new Iraq." Based on interviews with Iraqi women's rights activists, international policy makers, and NGO workers and illustrated with photographs taken by Iraqi women, What Kind of Liberation? speaks through an astonishing array of voices. Nadje al-Ali and Nicola Pratt correct the widespread view that the country's violence, sectarianism, and systematic erosion of women's rights come from something inherent in Muslim, Middle Eastern, or Iraqi culture. They also demonstrate how in spite of competing political agendas, Iraqi women activists are resolutely pressing to be part of the political transition, reconstruction, and shaping of the new Iraq.

[Al-khiyal]

Four killed in bomb near Kurdish party headquarters in Mosul

Baghdad, January 27, 2009 -- A car bomb exploded Tuesday near the headquarters of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) in eastern Mosul, killing four people and injuring one, a security source told Deutsche Presse- Agentur dpa.

The blast appears to be one of a string of politically-targeted attacks that have occurred in recent weeks, as Iraq gears up for provincial council elections on January 31.

The dead included four Iraqi army officers,' the source said. A member of Kurdish milita forces, or Peshmerga, was also wounded.

Mosul, the capital city of Nineveh province, lies some 400 km north of Baghdad.

In Baghdad, three policemen were wounded in a blast that occurred in the centre of the city, according to security forces.

A bomb went off near Uqba Bin Nafie Square as a police patrol vehicle was passing the location, the source told Voices of Iraq news agency.

On Monday, unknown gunmen killed a civil servant working for the Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) in the Yarmouk neighbourhood in the eastern part of Mosul.

The IHEC is a nine-member panel charged with overseeing balloting in the January 31 provincial elections.

In the city of Hilla, capital of Babil province, an independent candidate running for the municipal elections in Iraq escaped injury when unknown gunmen opened fire on his house on Saturday.

That assassination attempt came a week after gunmen killed Haitham al-Lihaibi, a candidate for the Babil provincial council affiliated with the party of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

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Britain ordered to release Iraq war minutes

LONDON, January 27, 2009 (AFP) – The British government was ordered Tuesday to release minutes of crucial ministerial meetings from 2003 at which the controversial US-led invasion of Iraq was discussed.

The Information Tribunal backed a decision to disclose minutes of Cabinet meetings from March 13 and 17, where ministers held talks about whether the decision to go to war was allowed under international law.

"We have decided that the public interest in maintaining the confidentiality of the formal minutes of two Cabinet meetings at which ministers decided to commit forces to military action in Iraq did not... outweigh the public interest in disclosure," the tribunal said.

"The decision to commit the nation's armed forces to the invasion of another country is momentous in its own right, and... its seriousness is increased by the criticisms that have been made of the general decision-making processes in the Cabinet at the time."

The Cabinet Office has 28 days to decide whether to appeal against the ruling. A spokesman for Prime Minister Gordon Brown's Downing Street office said: "We are considering our response."

Then prime minister Tony Blair was widely criticised for backing US president George W. Bush in invading Iraq to oust dictator Saddam Hussein despite failing to secure a second United Nations resolution on the stand-off.

Ministerial discussions focused notably on then attorney general Peter Goldsmith's advice on the legality of war.

Blair's government strongly resisted demands for the advice of its most senior legal adviser to be made public, until a large section was leaked during the 2005 general election campaign.

Goldsmith then denied ministers pressured him into changing his mind to rule that invading Iraq would be legal in international law even without a second UN Security Council resolution.

The information tribunal noted Tuesday that "there has... been criticism of the attorney general's legal advice and of the particular way in which the March 17 opinion was made available to the Cabinet only at the last moment and the March 7 opinion was not disclosed to it at all."

The tribunal ruling backed up a decision by Information Commissioner Richard Thomas.

He said: "I am pleased that the tribunal has upheld my decision that the public interest in disclosing the official Cabinet minutes in this particular case outweighs the public interest in withholding the information.

"Disclosing the minutes will allow the public to more fully understand this particular decision."

Former minister Clare Short, who resigned over Britain's involvement in the Iraq conflict, played down expectations from the minutes, if they are eventually released.

"I think people will be disappointed about how little the minutes will say. For example, they never attribute different points to different people. They are always in very generalised terms," she said.

"So I think it's very interesting indeed that the information commissioner has said they must be revealed, but I think they will disappoint people."

There was "very little proper discussion" in the Cabinet, she said. "Cabinet meetings were limited and the minutes are very generalised and limited."

[Al-khiyal]

Iraqi women on the edges of power

BAGHDAD, January 28, 2009: Amal Kibash, a candidate for the Baghdad provincial council, is running a bold and even feverish campaign by most standards.

With elections coming Saturday, Kibash never wastes a chance to reel in another voter. "You are going to vote for me, right?" she quizzed passers-by with a smile while strolling recently through her neighborhood of Sadr City, until May a battleground for Shiite militias. Giant posters of her veil-framed face were draped on several buildings, some of which still bore the marks of recent fighting.

In Basra, where until a year ago banners warned women that they would be shot if they wore too much makeup or ventured out of their homes without a veil, another female candidate, Ibtihal Abdul-Rahman, put up posters of herself last month. Encouraged by security improvements throughout the country, thousands of women are running for council seats in the provincial elections.

Of the estimated 14,400 candidates, close to 4,000 are women. Some female candidates have had their posters splattered with mud, defaced with beards or torn up, but most have been spared the violence that has claimed the lives of two male candidates and a coalition leader since the start of the year.

For many of these women, the elections offer a chance to inject some much-needed fresh air into councils that are currently plagued by deep corruption and dominated by men and big political parties that are often ultraconservative.

But even if they win, they face numerous hurdles, particularly the entrenched attitudes of most Iraqi men, who view women as either sex objects or child bearers who have no place in the rough-and-tumble world of politics.

"This is the mentality. We have to change it," said Safia Taleb al-Suhail, a member of Parliament "How can we change it? By fighting."

She is leading a group of female lawmakers who are lobbying to make sure that the same constitutional provision that mandates that 25 percent of all seats in Parliament go to women is applied to provincial councils as well. Currently, it is not.

Suhail, the daughter of a prominent Shiite tribal leader assassinated by Saddam Hussein's henchmen in Lebanon in 1994, returned to Iraq after the regime's fall for a chance to participate in shaping her country's political future.

While Iraq in the 1950s was the first Arab country to name a woman minister and adopt a progressive family law, the leadership aspirations of women were mostly quashed under Saddam's macho regime. The situation became further complicated for women after 2003, with the ascendance of religious parties.

Suhail and others were instrumental in lobbying Iraq's U.S. administrator at the time, L. Paul Bremer 3rd, to include the quota for women in the country's first transitional Constitution. It was preserved in the current Constitution because many felt that it was the only way to insure the participation of women in a male-dominated culture.

When it was published in October, the final version of the law regulating the provincial elections omitted the quota for women; it remains unclear whether that was deliberate or just an oversight. The electoral commission has ruled that the law as written is acceptable, saying that women are ensured of adequate representation by the requirement that a woman be chosen after every three men in any winning slate. Suhail responded that many of the candidate slates do not have enough women in them to meet that requirement, while other slates are made up of less than four candidates, all of whom are male.

Mahdiya Abed-Hassan al-Lami, a women's rights advocate and candidate in Baghdad running on the slate of a former prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, said that while she supports the quota system, it had been manipulated by the major political parties, both secular and religious, to marginalize women. Most of the women chosen for the large candidate slates are there for their family and tribal connections and loyalty to the sect or party, she said, rather than their qualifications.

"If women are simply followers, they cannot fulfill their roles properly," said Lami, who is a teacher and a devout Shiite. Her campaign has focused on reaching out to her network of women, particularly in some of the most destitute slums of Baghdad.

Kibash, another female candidate who is running on Jaafari's list, is currently a member of the Sadr City municipal council, but she and other women on the council are prevented by the men from sitting on the crucial and financially important services committee. She said the council is mired in corruption.

Despite the recent gains in security, some women continue to face threats, while others say the whole thing is a charade and not worth the effort.

Liza Hido sat on a municipal council but was forced to quit in 2006 after receiving threatening e-mails and text messages on her cellphone.

She is running again this year but, still concerned for her safety, she is keeping her campaigning discreet, putting up no posters and making no public appearances. Instead, she restricts herself to private gatherings.

Her friend, Bushra al-Obeidi, a law professor at Baghdad University, has rebuffed all efforts to convince her to become a candidate. She feels the odds are stacked against women, starting with laws she views as discriminatory toward women - one allows a rapist to largely escape punishment if he marries his victim. Obeidi also has little faith in the commitment to gender equality by the current political leadership, which is dominated by religious parties.

"I assure you they are against women, they are lying to us," she said.

Suhail, the lawmaker, admitted that Iraqi women have failed so far to break into the top levels of the political power structure, but says that this no reason to give up.

[Al-khiyal]

The battle against brutality

January 28, 2009 -- 'Women [in Iraq] are being killed simply for being women," says Nadje al-Ali when I meet her at her home in south London. "In Basra in 2008 a reported 133 women were killed for not 'being Islamic' enough. And these are only the ones that made it to be officially counted. I saw the police photos - they were horrific."

Al-Ali's new book, What Kind of Liberation? : Women and the Occupation of Iraq, analyses how Iraqi women have fared since the US invasion of March 2003. The news, unsurprisingly, is grim. Written with the political scientist Nicola Pratt, the book is based on interviews with 120 women, including Iraqi women's rights activists, NGO workers and international policymakers. The climate that they describe in Iraq is one of lawless "hyper-patriarchy", and with this evidence in tow, Al-Ali and Pratt take aim at a wide range of targets. These include the occupying powers, extremist Islamist militias, Iraqi leaders and "imperialist feminists" (those who claim solidarity with women from developing countries while stereotyping their cultures as barbaric).

Al-Ali, 42, is a second-generation Iraqi immigrant whose extended family has seen the sharpest end of both Saddam Hussein's regime and the post-invasion chaos. An established author and academic at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, she is staunchly "anti-imperialist and anti-war" but finds herself regularly at odds with some of her natural allies, who object to her speaking out against Iraqi resistance fighters. Still, Al-Ali believes it's important to take this stance. "A significant proportion of Iraqi groups engaged in armed resistance against the occupation are also harassing, intimidating and even murdering ordinary Iraqis," she says, "particularly women and vulnerable groups."

In her book she highlights the fact that, as a result of consecutive wars, the Iraqi population is now disproportionately female - with some estimates putting the ratio of women to men at 65/35. There are 300,000 impoverished widows in Baghdad alone, forced to run their households on two hours of electricity a day. As early as July 2003 a Human Rights Watch report highlighted "the vulnerability of women and girls to sexual violence and abduction", and kidnaps that target women (often related to sex trafficking) have increased since the start of the war, as have female suicide rates and honour killings.

According to Al-Ali's interviewees, women are being bullied back into the home. So, for instance, she focuses on the story of Sarwa Abdul Wahab Al Darwish, a 36-year-old television journalist from Mosul whose high profile led her to receive death threats. Then, last May she was dragged from a taxi and killed with a shot to the head in front of her mother. Overall, the book backs up the opinion of an Iraqi journalist I met in London, who says that "occupation has put women's position back to the 1930s".

The fact that George W Bush depicted the invasion of Iraq as a path to women's empowerment makes the situation even more outrageous. In her book, Al-Ali meticulously explains how Condoleezza Rice and Laura Bush were deployed to reassure the world that the US was concerned with women's liberation - Laura Bush being wheeled out for photo-opportunities with US organisations such as Women for Free Iraq.

How has such posturing in Washington affected women's lives in Iraq? "It helped to legitimise the invasion in the first place," says Al-Ali. But surely no one really believed that the war was about liberating Iraqi women? "There's an imperialist brand of feminism that's very widespread in the States," she says. "When I give talks there, women's rights [in Muslim culture] are always the one big 'but' for anti-war peace activists." Al-Ali feels that the cynical use of the women's rights discourse by the US has also led to a backlash against feminist activists in Iraq, who can be easily undermined, or even vilified, by being accused of supporting an American agenda.

Does she see the establishment of a 25% quota for women in the Iraqi parliament as a sign of progress? "Yes," she concedes, "but who are the 25% in practice? They are the sisters, daughters and wives of the male conservative leaders. They've no political background and when there's a vote they look around to see what the men are doing before they lift their hands. However, yes it is a positive because it has allowed six to eight secular women's rights activists into parliament who wouldn't have got in otherwise."

The book repeatedly suggests that extremist Islamist groups are forcing Taliban-like conditions on Iraqi women - surprising given the cultural differences between Afghanistan and Iraq, where women have typically been well educated. How real is this threat? "It's very real," says Al-Ali. "In 2004, it was simply leaflets telling women to veil, and many of the women I spoke to said, 'If this is the only thing I have to do to go on with my life as normal, OK.' Soon it moved on to students at Basra university being threatened if they didn't agree to gender-segregated classes." Now, article 41 in the new Iraqi constitution effectively repeals the existing, and relatively progressive, laws governing marriage and divorce.

When I point out that throughout the book Islam only ever appears as a destructive force Al-Ali is rattled. Her use of the slippery term "Islamists" at times seems interchangeable with "terrorist insurgents", and progressives are invariably tagged with the approving "secular" but never "Muslim". She defends herself by saying that in the past she has "clashed with fundamentalist secular groups [in the anti-war movement] who say the problem in Iraq is Islam. Most of the secular women activists we refer to are practising Muslims."

Al-Ali was born to a German mother and an Iraqi father who had moved to Europe to study. She grew up in a non-religious household in Germany, and it wasn't until she attended university in Tucson, Arizona - where she met a circle of confident second-generation Arabs - that she began to think about her roots. On graduating, she moved to Egypt and became involved in the women's movement, before starting a PhD in London. By chance, she rented a room from the feminist sociologist Cynthia Cockburn and for the next few years found herself at the hub of an international network of peace activists.

In 2000, she established Act Together - Women's Action for Iraq - a group opposing economic sanctions against Iraq, and then against the invasion. This was followed, in 2007, by her book Iraqi Women - Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present, a social history of the women's movement. Al-Ali dedicated the book to her aunt Salima, a cancer patient who died in May 2003 after she developed severe breathing difficulties and a curfew in Baghdad prevented her from getting to hospital.

The short description of the night of Salima's death - when one of her male relatives went out into the neighbourhood, risking his life to find oxygen - fizzes with fury. The family had already coped with one of Al-Ali's uncles being executed under Saddam, and they remained in Baghdad until the murder of her nephew and another uncle in August 2007 at the family home, for what she now believes to be either political or sectarian reasons. "They thought they were safe, knowing all their neighbours, so they were just sitting in the kitchen when they strolled in and shot them." The rest of the family fled from Iraq to Jordan, thereby joining the two million Iraqis abroad. They put the three young men of the family on a plane to Syria for safety but they were turned back, forced to return to Baghdad. "We were very, very scared," says Al-Ali, "and there's only so much one can do from the outside."

Al-Ali treads a difficult path with caution. Like many, she believes that Iraqi women can never be "liberated" by western military intervention, but by speaking out against the Iraqi resistance, she has often alienated those in the anti-war movement. Ultimately, she doesn't know how much difference her work can make - she tells me that she often feels impotent watching atrocities in Iraq unfold on the news. But she is adamant that the future of Iraq depends on the energy and fearlessness of the grass roots women's groups that were much in evidence just after the invasion. It was they who went into hospitals and schools to salvage them and who have managed to co-operate across sectarian battle lines. "I hate the picture of Iraqi women as passive victims of honour crimes and bombs," she says. "I really want to break this".

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Iraq sends first ambassador to Syria in decades

BAGHDAD, January 28, 2009 (Xinhua) -- After more than a quarter-century of severed ties, Iraq's first ambassador to Syria will arrive in Damascus on Thursday, an Iraqi Foreign Ministry official said Wednesday.

"I can confirm that Mr. Alaa al-Jawadi will arrive to Damascus on Thursday to embark his job after decades of severed ties," an official in the ministry told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

Jawadi served as director of Arab Affairs department at the Iraqi Foreign Ministry before being appointed as Iraqi ambassador to Syria, the source said.

Syria broke diplomatic ties with Iraq in 1982, when Syria sided with Iran in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. The two countries began to restore ties in 1997.

In 2006, Syria and Iraq announced they restored ties during a visit to Baghdad by Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem.

Late in October last year, Syria sent Nawaf Aboud al-Sheik Fares as its ambassador to Iraq.