{"id":256095,"date":"2026-07-13T14:31:20","date_gmt":"2026-07-13T11:31:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/1kitap1.com\/en\/city-of-widows-an-iraqi-womans-account-of-war-and-resistance-haifa-zangana\/"},"modified":"2026-07-13T14:31:20","modified_gmt":"2026-07-13T11:31:20","slug":"city-of-widows-an-iraqi-womans-account-of-war-and-resistance-haifa-zangana","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1kitap1.com\/en\/city-of-widows-an-iraqi-womans-account-of-war-and-resistance-haifa-zangana\/","title":{"rendered":"City Of Widows An Iraqi Womans Account Of War And Resistance – Haifa Zangana"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Inside Iraq, the budget allocated to women\u2019s NGOs amounted to several million US dollars. According to Paul Bremer, on June 30, 2004, on the eve of handing over sovereignty to Iyad Allawi\u2019s8 interim government, Bremer had \u201callocated almost $750 million from the American and Iraqi budgets. Much of the program was meant to build the institutions and organizations that formed what we westerners call civil society.\u201d9 Judy Van Rest explained to Allawi that \u201cwe are establishing these institutions all over Iraq .<\/p>\n

. . our provincial offices [have] midwifed the birth of dozens of human rights centers, nongovernmental organizations, legal associations, even PTAs. We had funds to set up women\u2019s centers in all eighteen provinces, nine in Baghdad alone.\u201d10 In fact, this money was mainly spent on organizing conferences, mostly outside Iraq, and training selected women to be leaders on \u201cdemocracy.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to a fact sheet issued by the US State Department\u2019s Office of the Senior Coordinator for International Women\u2019s Issues on June 22, 2005, \u201cThe United States allocated nearly half a billion dollars to support democracy-building programs in Iraq\u2014including projects that specifically help women with democratic organization and advocacy.\u201d11 Tracing the history of how some of these organizations came to be established will shed light on their role as civil-society organizations intended to be the \u201csoft occupiers\u201d in the aftermath of liberation.<\/p>\n

On October 4, 2002, at a highly publicized official event called \u201cThe Unheard Voices of Iraqi Women,\u201d held at the National Press Club in Washington DC, the audience was invited to listen to accounts of Saddam\u2019s persecution of women as told by \u201cseven Iraqi women of different regional, ethnic and religious backgrounds.\u201d12 The event was sponsored by the International Alliance for Justice (IAJ), which has Congressional funding, and was attended by Safia Taleb al- Suhail, the IAJ advocacy director for the Middle East and Islamic world.<\/p>\n

The panel also included Zakia Ismail Hakki, a lawyer and former president of the Kurdish Women\u2019s Foundation, and Katrin Michael, a member of the Iraqi opposition in Washington, who lived through chemical attacks unleashed by Saddam Hussein on Iraq\u2019s Kurdish population in June 1987. Katrin Michael, who joined the Iraqi Women\u2019s League13 as a teenager and had lived in the United States since 1997, explained in an interview on December 12, 2002, only five months before the invasion, how the US administration had ignored Iraqi women\u2019s rights.<\/p>\n

Her goal was \u201cto make the women of Iraq as visible to the American public as the women of Afghanistan were a year ago, when the Bush administration criticized the Taliban for its repressive attitude toward the country\u2019s women and girls.\u201d14 More importantly, she wanted to make the administration take note of the presence of women within the opposition.<\/p>\n

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I – The Transition to Modernity II – Invading Iraq III – Life Under Occupation IV – Resistance Afterword Notes Acknowledgements Copyright Page To the memory of A\u2019beer Qassim Hamza al-Janaby, the fourteen- year-old girl who was gang-raped and set on fire by US troops in Mahmudiyah, twenty miles south of Baghdad, on March 12, 2006. Introduction This is a story written in exile, in the hopes that readers in the West will gain insight into a country they have impacted so fully and terribly.<\/p>\n

Writing this book is also a personal history that includes my story of growing up in Baghdad: living through wars and periods of peace and prosperity; joining movements for social change and participating in armed struggle; and working for equality as a woman, an Iraqi, and as a citizen of the world. The US-UK catastrophic adventure has been shrouded by the old colonial phrase \u201cliberators not conquerors,\u201d and by the new imperial lie of \u201cestablishing democracy.\u201d Both require the rewriting of Iraqi modern history, a process in which Iraqi people, women in particular, are often invisible or portrayed as victims.<\/p>\n

I have written this book to challenge this neocolonial misrepresentation. I hope there is also substance here for readers already wary of propaganda. I have tried to address the prevailing stereotypes of our history, society, and culture, and some of the misconceptions about the people of the Middle East. This is also an attempt to clarify how Arab and Muslim women, particularly in Iraq, continue to shape our modern history in response to the devastating situation they find themselves in due to external and homegrown challenges.<\/p>\n

It is a story of tremendous suffering and sacrifice, of courage and triumph, and also of hope and humanity. Iraqi women have been among the most liberated of their gender in the Middle East. They have a long history of political activism and social participation since the nineteenth century, having taken part in the struggle against colonial domination and in the fight for national unity, social justice, and legal equality throughout the twentieth century.<\/p>\n

In fact, UNICEF reported in 1993, \u201cRarely do women in the Arab world enjoy as much power and support as they do in Iraq.\u201d Nonetheless, as part of the misguided preparation for the US invasion of Iraq, Iraqi women had been selected to be the beacon of hope for all women in the Middle East. They were presented, along with the rest of our population, as needing to be liberated, despite the complex social history and systems in place in Iraq at the time.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.<\/em><\/p>\n

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