Violence Leads To Spate Of "Temporary" Marriages For Iraqi Widows

McClatchy:

At 18, Zahraa Abdulrasool married a man 15 years her senior, a good man, she said, who never refused a day's work. To support his family, he drove a truck from Basra to Baghdad, a perilous journey in these days of war, sectarian violence and lawlessness.

"I pleaded with him to stop," she said, " to find some other kind of work, but there was no other work."

Read the whole story: McClatchy

Comments

[Merg]

When the US finally concedes that it must take its share of Iraqi refugees, these women should be among the first to come with their children.

[matahari888]

Let's pray for all people...who suffered because of this STUPID war....
We may condemn all people for whatever reason got a profit for doping bussiness during war....they are the same criminal as Bush administration...

[nefertiti]

Many iraqi ladies with no Husbands and no qualitifications have turned to prostitution and working in Night clubs in syria , (where the majority of customers i read , were saudis )

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gJ_6WrwJ2aQJHU3gO34fs_bxD6Aw

[nefertiti]

Quote :A widow must wait at least a month and 10 days after losing her husband.

NO according to Islam , she must wait 3 months to make sure she is not pregnant by previous husband .

the Sunni Muslims (80% of muslims) frown upon this kind of Marriage and find it unvalid .

[peacekitten]

poverty is a killer of the soul and spirit just as surely as bullets and bombs kill the body. it is a profound violence against the spirit, and turns its victims into people they do not even know. they become strangers to themselves just to survive.

at some point there will come the question of whether or not their survival is worth it to them anymore. many of them will make the sad choice that it is not, because there are some things that are worse than death. in afghanistan, self-immolation, the preferred method of suicide, has been on the rise among women since the latest incarnation of war visited their country. they choose this gruesome method of attempted suicide because there is such a stigma attached to the idea of taking one's own life.

poverty robs a person of choices, of even the knowledge that they are entitled to be treated with a modicum of respect for no other reason than they are human beings.

our nation's government has created this horror with the full knowledge of what they were doing, and the pain it would cause. the very definition of evil.

the violence and suffering that has been wrought upon the innocent families of iraqi civilians is but the latest incarnation of something that has been true of all wars, which is that it is the innocent who bear the brunt of the sorrow. the ones who cause it, the wrinkled, greedy old men who casually order pieces on a chess board into battle will not know the anguish, the hunger, poverty, loneliness, and fear their caprices cause.

there are no winners in war, only degrees of losing. these women and their families are at the extremes of the scale.

is it any wonder they have come to hate and fear us?

[geobushono]

I am so fucking mad I can't write a coherent paragraph.

[dora rice]

snd them all to Bush's ranch.

[ljsfolly]

In the comfort of my own home I am ashamed to not have thought of the outcome of so much murder of Iraqis for it is the bodies of men we mostly hear about. That they have families is just common sense and to leave them is more poverty than what I already saw isn't something seen or heard of until this post. Bush has not the demension within himself nor the morals to understand just what he has done to these people in their country. In their own country if we were to believe him they should be safe and able to live in a democracy. But we cannot believe him not his ilk and must look past the dead and see what he wrought.

[ConcernedAboutRFuture]

Oh how sad. Not only are these women treated as expendable property in their society.....but now they must allow men to treat them as meat.... to feed their children.

My heart bleeds for them... as I know I cannot help them until Bush goes away.

Away evil Bush.... away with you!!!

[researcher]

the pitfalls of imperialism. most americans are more concerned about rising gas prices than the hell we have brought to the iraqis.

we are an imperialists and war mongering nation in our hearts. took years of conditioning of the industrial war machine and corporate america with some help from the zionists.

most americans still think a 500 billion dollar military budget is for defense not offense.

capitalism to imperialism to fascism.

[brooklyncitizen]

This is tragic. America really sucks.

[MajorKong]

Note that most Iraqi women didn't used to dress like the one's in the picture. It used to be very common to see Iraqi women dressed in western fashions.

Since we took out the Baathist goverment, there's been a huge increase in attacks on women who don't dress in traditional garb or who even venture out in public unescorted (by husband or male relative).

[Dap]

Patiarchal system, hmmmmmm, imagine that?

Who would have thunk it.

[freespeach]

This is a very painful thing to read, to know that our nation unleashed this Hell in Iraq and that we continue to enable it to happen.

This article should be read by every single war supporter. The ones who need it most will ignore it. What a shame.

[JSquercia]

Sure sounds like Prostitution to me . If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck : it's a DUCK .