Who will help Iraq’s widows?

[unhappycamper]

Fawzia Abdalaabi Hassan, left, whose husband was killed in a tribal dispute 12 years ago, finds herself in a similar situation as many Iraqi widows. With no government help and no family to support her, she says she is forced to rely on handouts and has already married off her two teenage daughters and taken her 12-year-old son out of school.


Who will help Iraq’s widows?
By Michael Gisick, Stars and Stripes
Online Edition, Wednesday, March 10, 2010

BAGHDAD — The last time Safia Ismail talked to her husband over the phone, she told him not to come for her and their two daughters.

Fighting had engulfed their Baghdad neighborhood in that bleak spring of 2006, trapping them in the house. But the streets were too dangerous, she told him. The road from Ramadi, where he had gone to tend to his extended family, was worse. Wait, she told him.

But he said he was already in the car, and then he disappeared somewhere along the way. She never found his body.

“Even still,” she said nearly four years later, “I feel like someone who has fallen to the ground.”

Left to fend for herself and her daughters after her brother was killed later that year, Ismail was, in one sense at least, far from alone. According to one study cited by Iraqi government officials, some 900,000 widows live here, or 1 in 10 women over the age of 15, among the highest percentages in the world. Many, like Ismail, will never know what happened to their husbands.


Rest of article at: http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=68601

[NNN0LHI]

1. I was reading the other day there are over 4 million widows in Iraq

That is unbelievable.

Don

[malaise]

3. But but but

the neo-cons have declared victory. Those widows are on their own. :cry:

[KG]

4. i'm sure madeline albright thinks it's worth it.

:eyes:

[KG]

2. well, they got democracy now, what more could they ask for?

:eyes:

[Echo In Light]

5. k/r

[NNN0LHI]

6. Only two recommendations

I fear we may be losing our way.

Don