- They say that abductions and rape in "liberated
Iraq" are only rumours.
-
- But on 22 May, Baida Sadik left her home in Shaab City,
Baghdad, for school and never returned. Her fellow students said they saw
her being shoved at gunpoint into a car. It was just after 8am.
-
- She is - or was - 16 years old. The dark-haired, green-eyed
Baida had pleaded with her uncle to be allowed to return to school amid
Baghdad's post-war anarchy because she knew that her future depended on
her studies - she wanted to become a nurse. But the full story of her ordeal
may never be known. Her sister Nagham fears she is already dead.
-
- For weeks, the reported rape and kidnapping of young
women in Baghdad was treated with a mixture of scepticism and fear. But
the tens of thousands of families who kept their daughters from school
- or insisted US troops guard their classes - appear to have had good reason
to worry.
-
- At the al-Kindi University Hospital in Baghdad, Dr Ahmed
Assafi, the emergency room resident, says he has treated five young women
who were raped in the aftermath of the war. But he says many other cases
are never officially reported because of the Arab "honour" code
towards women.
-
- "Baghdad has become a jungle, where anyone can disappear
- and without anyone daring to intervene," Dr Assafi said as he prepared
to help a middle-aged Iraqi man who had been shot in the head by thieves
trying to steal his car.
-
- The latest rape case treated by the doctor was a female
student at the Shaab City Secondary School. Like Baida, she was abducted
on her way to school but, in this case, the kidnappers threw acid in her
face to prevent her ever being able to identify them. The men spent two
hours in the car raping the blinded girl.
-
- Somehow, the student managed to escape and was taken
to hospital.
-
- Baida Sadik's brothers have been relentlessly searching
for her since she disappeared, plastering the walls of Baghdad's hospitals,
police stations and schools with her picture, taking turns to drive around
the slums at night even though they risk being killed. Attached to Baida's
portrait is a note that says: "In the name of honour, please come
forward".
-
- Honour, indeed, seems to be a theme in the tragedy of
Baghdad's kidnapped women. It plays an essential role in the patriarchal
Iraqi society, where a woman has to preserve her dignity at all costs to
safeguard her family's reputation.
-
- Sahar al-Yassri, a lawyer who has represented rape victims,
explained: "In Iraq, a woman who suffers rape or has been abducted
becomes dead to society." Before the war, women who wished to prosecute
their aggressors after a sexual assault would be referred by the police
for examination by doctors at the Baghdad mortuary.
-
- DNA tests were unavailable during the 12 years of UN
sanctions against Iraq.
-
- But Dr Ali Fa'ak, the director of the Baghdad morgue,
says that in the "New Iraq" women can no longer be referred to
him. "They are now even more vulnerable than before the war because
they can't have their assailants prosecuted," he says. This has produced
a grim situation. Because the corpses of men and women are still examined
by pathologists, a raped woman has a better chance of triggering an investigation
if she is dead.
-
- http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=413160
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