Friday, August 15, 2014

New found interest in Iraqi women?

Mariz Tadros (Guardian) writes:


Evidence that women belonging to the Yazidi and Christian religious minorities in Iraq are being raped and sold into slavery by the Islamic State (Isis) is mounting. One of the first to speak out was Vian Dakheel, the only Yazidi female MP who addressed the Iraqi parliament last week, despite the speaker telling her to be quiet and stick to the agreed statement.
“Mr Speaker, our women are being taken as slaves and being sold in the slave market,” she said.
A spokesman for Iraq’s human rights ministry, Kamil Amin, confirmed that the Islamist group had captured Yazidi women under 35 years old, that it is holding them in schools and likely to use them as slaves.

Why, Tadros wonders, isn't this everywhere?

Well, first off, western powers have a history of using such events -- real or imagined -- to promote war and justify assaults on people.

Real or imagined, such events tend to result in 'action' which does nothing to help the women -- see Afghanistan, for example.

Second, I'm sorry, Tadros, aren't you being ahistorical?

You are.

Religious minority women have been targeted since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

You're only just now noticing?

Are you five-years-old or six?

Put on your big girl panties, Tadros, cause you're going to need to do a lot of work today to catch up.

This is not a new development.  It's been going on forever throughout the war.

And it's get a little bit of attention here and there -- as with most issues having to do with Iraqi women, it's largely ignored.

The biggest attention the issue received was the faux Romeo & Juliet story from many years ago.  In that one, supposedly a man and a young woman had fallen in love.  They went back to tell her parents and tribe and, if you read Patrick Cockburn's original report, she was hanged.  If you real real news outlets, you know she was stoned to death.

Regardless, it most likely wasn't the love story promoted but part of the continued efforts to destroy religious minority women in Iraq.

It has been going on for years, it has been documented by many NGOs but it's suddenly a concern to Tadros?

What's different?

Oh, that's right.

She's connecting it to the Islamic State and Sunnis.

She's now bothered by an ongoing issue and using it to what?  Motivate action?

That's why people step away from you and your issue, Tadros.

It looks less like you care about Iraqi women -- you clearly don't care enough to even do the basic work required to grasp this isn't a Sunni issue -- and more like you're pimping war and are convinced you've found your issue.

When you can write about it in a manner that doesn't suggest this ongoing, over a decade long problem didn't just start yesterday, people might care about the issue.

Right now, it just looks like you're attempting to inflame tensions further in order to give the world more war.

P.S. Where was your tired ass when Sunni women and girls were being tortured and raped in Nouri's jails and prisons?

Maybe if you'd ever weighed in on that, people would take you a little more seriously.

In other developments, Al Arabyia News reports:

 Iraq’s most influential cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, threw his weight behind the new prime minister and said the transition was a rare opportunity to resolve political and security crises, Reuters reported.
Underscoring the urgency of containing a sectarian conflict fueled by Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) militants, Sistani urged the military to hoist only Iraq’s flag to avoid factionalism. The cleric called on lawmakers to meet “historical responsibility,” and cooperate with the Prime Minister designate Haidar al-Abadi to form government.

Meanwhile Ammar Karim (AFP) sums up the mood, "Iraqis and foreign brokers breathed a sigh of relief Friday after Nuri al-Maliki dropped his bid for a third term as prime minister, a move seen as vital to tackling a spiralling military and humanitarian crisis."





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