I am going to be using this article in my term paper on Iraqi women. Its almost finished, and I plan on posting it tommorow. In the meantime, here is the article.
Source:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2003May11.html
For Crime Victims in Iraq, No Place to Turn
Anger, Fear Rise as Anarchy Continues
Sauzen Khazi sits in her currency exchange shop where an unidentified relative holds a Kalashnikov for protection. (Photos Richard Leiby -- The Washington Post)
By Richard Leiby
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 12, 2003; Page C01
BAGHDAD, May 11 -- Late Friday night, two young women arrived at the iron gates of the Alwia neighborhood's maternity hospital, where a dust-covered white statue of a nursing mother welcomes patients and visitors. The teenagers were bruised and bloody, hospital workers recall. They asked to see a female doctor.
An OB-GYN named Enas Hamdani examined them. The doctor's disgust and anger grew as the pair sobbed out their story. While they were walking last Wednesday afternoon to buy bread at the market, three men in an orange-and-white taxi kidnapped them at gunpoint. They were driven several miles, they said, to a small house on the periphery of the city, in a farming area they'd never been before.
The well-appointed hideout included beds, satellite television and a supply of food, the patients told Hamdani.
"They were 18 and 19 years old. They were virgins," Hamdani says in an interview in her office today. "You can imagine what happened, of course."
Her examination showed evidence of repeated rape and sodomy, which the victims told her was carried out by five men for 36 hours. The women also had been beaten with boards on their faces and backs, she says.
The doctor's detailed account could not be independently verified with the victims -- they were Muslim, according to staff on duty that night, and would not talk to journalists about such things. Rape has a terrible stigma in the Islamic world, leading some victims to seek treatment privately and never report the crime. Even in nominally secular Iraq, rape -- and the consequent loss of virginity -- can mean that a woman is unable to marry and is expelled from the home. It can even lead to women being killed by male relatives because "it is a shame upon the family," Hamdani says.
The attackers dumped the victims on a roadside Friday afternoon, according to the doctor, and they were taken back to Baghdad by a sympathetic taxi driver. Before leaving the hospital, they asked for a medical certificate showing they had been raped, but doctors told them they had no such authority. Hamdani and her colleague, Khilood Yunis, an OB-GYN who was also on duty, directed them to an Iraqi police forensic unit where swabs could be taken as evidence.
But the unit, like so many police facilities here, is shuttered. Symbols of Saddam Hussein's hated security apparatus, stations were looted and burned to the ground by Iraqis after Baghdad fell to U.S. troops.
As much as she despises the rapists, Hamdani reserves a special contempt for American forces who conquered Baghdad more than a month ago. She and others have heard repeated promises that reconstituted Iraqi police patrols, accompanied by military units, will be here soon. But in many neighborhoods, military commanders say their troops are stretched thinly and have no training in police work.
"Everybody needs security, everywhere in Iraq. Where is it?" the doctor asks, adjusting her head scarf and batting away flies. "We don't even know where to ask."
The doctor cocks a finger toward her head, as if it's a gun. "It's like the Texas you see in the movies." She means the Wild West.
Reports of rapes, holdups and murders are multiplying citywide, in both poor and upscale districts. In this city of 5 million, the dearth of police is a fundamental problem, but certainly not the only one: Electrical power, gasoline, clean water and medical supplies remain unavailable or out of reach for many residents. The looting that broke out after the fall of Baghdad was a harbinger of a slow devolution into fear and despair, especially after dark, especially for women.
It's better to just sleep at the hospital, says Yunis, the chief of residents -- she feels safer and can be there for women who arrive late at night to deliver babies. "We are frightened for our lives," she reports with a weary sigh. "You can't imagine what it's like when we hear all this shooting near the hospital at night."
Before the war, "I could leave the house at midnight to see my patients. Not now." Like many Baghdadis, she won't let her teenage daughters attend school. "My husband has only one job now -- to stay at home and be their bodyguard."
An auburn-haired nurse, Samara Hassan, arrives to voice more complaints: Ambulances can't be dispatched because patients can't call the hospital. Most phones in Baghdad don't work. And anyway, it's nearly impossible to get gasoline for ambulances, even though the country sits on a sea of oil. Lines at the official gas stations wind for blocks because they lack security to operate round-the-clock as they did under Saddam.
A little girl dressed in pink emerges sleepily from a nearby storage room. She climbs onto Hassan's lap.
The nurse is a single mother. She and her daughter, Maryam, have been living here for a week. "What else can we do?" She throws up her hands.
Where Are the Police?
Venture into several neighborhoods and harrowing eyewitness accounts emerge without prompting. Here's a man named Ali Taha, 36, wearing grimy blue overalls, fixing tires in the Alamia district: "Three days ago, a woman was walking near here and men with guns grabbed her by the hair and kidnapped her."
"Yes, I saw it," says a man who strolls by and overhears Taha's account. "I know her. She is 26 and it happened at 11 in the morning. They took her into a Passat taxi. Nobody has seen her since then."
Oh, yes, and down the block a man was shot in the stomach waiting at a traffic light. The gunmen took his car. Across town in the Zayuna neighborhood, a man was shot and killed Friday. He was going with his wife to services at an Orthodox Christian church.
Where are the police? The U.S. military?
Nobody knows. Few have seen them.
In the New Baghdad district -- one of the city's most dangerous -- Majad Hamad, 30, is selling strollers, children's bicycles and backpacks. He surveys the market across the street, in front of a mosque. It's full of people shopping for produce and looted goods, including computers, this afternoon.
Nearly everyone on the streets is male. "Only old women go out during the day," Hamad reports. "I won't cross the street without two pistols."
A mother with two boys walks up, unescorted, to inspect a tricycle. Is she scared? Yes, Sauzen Khazi says, tightly clutching her handbag, but she works just a hundred yards away. She runs a currency exchange shop and is poised to flee in that direction.
The shop didn't require armed guards in the past, when Saddam's government swiftly caught and punished thieves. Now her husband, Hasham Hussein, is armed with a pistol. Another male relative brandishes a Kalashnikov. The men say a jewelry store owner around the corner was robbed and killed 10 days ago.
In a cobbler's shop nearby, proprietor Samir Gul reports what happened a week ago. Right out front, at 2 p.m., two girls -- about 17 -- were stuck up by men with large knives. A car came by, its driver offering to rescue the women. It was a ruse. When the teenagers got in, the kidnappers did too.
The men in the cobbler's shop, fearing they'd be shot, did nothing. Ordered earlier to disarm by American soldiers, the men had no guns.
"They promised us security," Gul says of the soldiers. "We're asking for it now."
Three U.S. Army Humvees roll past, escorting a military trailer carrying a large white Iraqi missile, evidently discovered in the neighborhood. He's also seen more soldiers on patrol lately. How many?
"Not enough."
'Starting From Zero'
U.S. Army Maj. Jack Nales sits in his office behind a scarred desk. In front of the desk are three chairs that have no backs. The windows are smashed. The walls are black with soot. This is a former police station not far from the Alwia hospital.
"Security, security, security -- that's our mantra too. That's our number one priority," says Nales, 46, a reservist with the 422nd Civil Affairs Battalion. In civilian life he ran a chapter of the Red Cross in Fayetteville, N.C., so he knows about the importance of swift response to emergencies. His men patrol constantly in tanks and other vehicles equipped with heavy weapons. But security for the general public was never meant to be the mission here. The priority was security for U.S. troops, who still face random attacks.
"It's frustrating," Nales says. "We do not have the personnel or the training to be policemen."
Every day, Iraqis mill outside the headquarters, asking for murders and thefts to be investigated. He's heard reports of kidnappings and rapes. Nales dispatches men when he can but has gotten used to making apologies.
"I'm sorry," he says he tells Iraqis, but it's just too early to expect reliable utilities or supplies of food and water. "I'm sorry the police agencies and judicial system isn't here. I'm sorry we don't have enough soldiers to help you.
"I'm sorry."
In the hallway, Sgt. 1st Class Keith Hudson, the enlisted man in charge of security for the neighborhood, has moved beyond frustration to anger. He blames top U.S. officials in charge of the reconstruction effort for failing to plan for the chaos. He says he watched an 18-month-old child "draw her last breath" the other day. His soldiers were responding to a drive-by automatic weapons attack on civilians by Iraqi gunmen.
"It happens every day," he says. "Our hands are tied."
A few miles away, near the city soccer stadium, the 18th Military Police Brigade is recruiting former Iraqi policemen, but only those who worked at the lowest level. Many officers can't be trusted and are despised by the public. They were corrupt and enforced the law mainly through terror.
Maj. Gillian Boice, 35, who arrived 10 days ago from the brigade's base in Germany, says the MPs are processing 4,000 Iraqis to assist with patrols. Service weapons are being issued, but there aren't enough police vehicles yet. "We're working very hard," she says, "and the Iraqis are eager to work. We've been very well-received."
She blames rapes, murders and the rampant street crime on thugs that Saddam released from jail before the war. "We're starting from zero," she says, but don't blame America. The major only wants to be quoted if this is a "positive story." So here is her key statement: "We will protect the people."
But many Iraqis have soured on the Americans' talk. Freedom has brought only trouble, they say. It was better under Saddam.
Back at the hospital, where the staff lives in fear, where the generator was stolen, where there is no power for equipment to monitor patients and cockroaches infest the bathrooms, Yunis is near tears. She quotes an old Iraqi adage: "Don't say something is tasty until you've actually tasted it."
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
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