Rising Ranks of Widows Worry Iraqis

(May 9) -- Suad Rzuki Aboud lost her husband, three sons and a son-in-law when Sunni insurgents blew up the family bakery.

As she held her dying husband, "I was pleading for anyone to help," says Aboud, 50. "No one came."

Aboud, her youngest son and widowed daughter fled their Shiite neighborhood with "just the clothes on our backs" and wound up as squatters in an apartment with eight other people. She sold her last possessions, two gold bracelets, to pay the rent. She survives on $50 a month from the government.

Violence in this country creates more widows by the day, and some members of parliament and women's advocates warn of a growing class of poor, single mothers unable to raise Iraq's next generation.

They say the situation has been made worse by U.S.-backed constitutional changes that allow each religious sect to decide its own rules on marriage, divorce, inheritance and child custody.

The shrinking of women's rights in marriage "is as important as the oil issue," says Maysoon Al-Damluji, a secular member of Iraq's parliament.

She says Article 41 of Iraq's new constitution is "a recipe for disaster." If parliament implements it, the deference to Islamic law would reverse gains made under a 1959 law that gave Iraqi women greater rights than in any other Arab country, women's advocates say.

Nathan Brown, director of the Institute for Middle East Studies at George Washington University, says parliament has not yet implemented Article 41, but "in practice, Iraqi civil courts have taken sect into account in personal status matters."

A bill that would help widows and other single women get job training, housing, health care and other help has stalled in parliament. Al-Damluji says the legislation was "not fully thought through" and some lawmakers think it's too expensive.

'Social Stigma'

At least 70,000 women have been widowed by bloodshed since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, says Narmeen Othman, acting minister of women's affairs. Of about 1.3 million widows, 80% lost husbands in conflicts, including the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980, the Persian Gulf War in 1991 and sectarian uprisings.

Othman says a fraction of the poorest, about 86,000, receive $35 to $100 a month from the government.

Many more need help because women often lack skills or family support for them and their children. And employers still prefer to hire men, Al-Damluji says.

"In the eyes of society, women always need a man to protect them and keep them straight," she says. "There is still some social stigma about a woman being on her own."

To help these women, Salma Al-Azawi founded the Center for Training and Development for Widows in the Karada neighborhood in 2006. More than 260 woman have learned sewing, cooking, nursing, computers and business management. Many have been given jobs.

Al-Azawi says tradition dictates that a woman move in with her husband's family after she marries. If she becomes a widow, she is often cast adrift. "If the man dies, the link is severed," she says. "In many cases, the woman is asked to take the children and go back to her family."

Often there is no family, or the woman's parents are unable or unwilling to take back their daughter, let alone her children. A widow, Othman says, is "a second-class person."

Nuha Faraj became a widow 20 days after her wedding, when insurgents shot and killed her policeman husband last December. "It was the biggest shock of my life," says Faraj, 19.

She says she was told her husband's parents wrote on his death certificate that he was single so they could inherit his pension. "No one stood by me," she says.

A recent survey of widows in the Karada neighborhood by the Iraq Health Access Program, a private health education group, found most widows have post-traumatic stress, high blood pressure and sleep problems.

A report presented at the American Psychiatric Association meeting in Washington this week noted that women carried out 12 suicide attacks in Iraq this year, as many as in the previous five years combined.

'Easily Exploitable'

"Iraq is a country of widows," says Farhana Ali, a former U.S. adviser on terrorism. "When women are vulnerable and have to protect themselves and play the role of the man and woman of the household, they are easily exploitable."

More common is that many widows are forced to beg. Others turn to prostitution. Sunni extremists killed three prostitutes and wounded two others in Mosul this week, the latest in a growing number of attacks on women considered immoral under Muslim standards. Other targets include hair salons and women dressed in Western clothing.

Despite the dangers of trying to make it on their own, many widows have no choice. When Houriyah Ammar's 15-year-old son was kidnapped eight months ago, she lost the last man in her life. She supports three daughters in college by sewing sheets at the widow's center.

"Can you imagine a woman by herself supporting three girls, and I don't even have my father?" says Ammar, 46. "Life is very difficult."

Contributing: wire reports