More than 1,000 women were surveyed and fully 43 percent said that women don’t have a right to own all types of property, even though Iraqi law does give them this right.
By SETH J. FRANTZMANIraqi women demonstrators hold signs during ongoing anti-government protests in Kerbala, Iraq January 10, 2020(photo credit: REUTERS/ABDULLAH DHIAA AL-DEEN)
Iraqi women may have rights under Iraq’s law but in practice many are denied rights to property and face struggles to receive inheritance of basic necessities. The Norwegian Refugee Council published research that shows that “hundreds of thousands of Iraqi women displaced by war remain unable to return to their homes of because systematic injustices.”Women face a difficult road ahead in an Iraq after ISIS where many bore the brunt of suffering, displacement and abuses. Now women who want to return home often face barriers if they don’t have a husband or men to take possession of their property. For instance, it appears that nine percent of women in provinces such as Kirkuk or Anbar found property occupied by male tribal leaders, militias or soldiers. These are areas that were liberated from ISIS in 2017.More than 1,000 women were surveyed and fully 43 percent said that women don’t have a right to own all types of property, even though Iraqi law does give them this right. Twenty percent of women said they had no inheritance rights. They receive nothing in divorce despite laws that should provide them support.“The systemic injustices that hundreds of thousands of displaced Iraqi women face mean the wounds of war will continue to fester” said Rishana Hanifa, NRC’s Country Director in Iraq. “Women are prevented from rebuilding their lives after conflict. Reconstruction efforts which focus only on infrastructure and ignore women’s rights are bound to fail.”Iraq has been in a state of instability, civil war and suffering from economic disaster, religious extremism, genocide, ethnic cleansing, religious cleansing and terror for almost two decades. Prior to that it was under sanctions and prior to that a brutal war with Iran and genocide at the hands of the Saddam Hussein regime. Yet parts of Iraq once thrived with decent health care and modern cities. Not all of Iraq is the same, in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq there is more stability. However, other parts of Iraq have forced people to rely on tribes and militias for security as the country’s leaders have failed to provide even basic things like clean water to areas such as Basra. Iranian agents scour Iraq for funds and information and Iraq is forced to rely on Iran for electricity imports as Iran soaks up profits from Iraq. While the NRC study did not touch on these issues, Iraq’s multiplicity of problems contributes to the declining status of women and their rights.The NRC concludes that “while Iraqi law guarantees women’s property rights, family traditions and tribal customs mean that the majority of women face insurmountable barriers to achieving those rights.” Unfortunately this leaves women begging tribal sheikhs for their own property. Official papers are seen as meaningless in some areas. Women who were accused of being linked to ISIS, sometimes via family, also lost lands and homes. This primarily affected Sunni Arab women. Now it appears that up to 64% of people in Iraq who were surveyed also fear they cannot pay rent due to the economic and coronavirus crisis.“NRC calls on the Iraqi government to put women’s property rights at the centre of its reconstruction process, and to expedite dispute resolution through special procedures to solve backlog of cases created by Covid-19 shutdown measures. NRC also calls on international donors to condition reconstruction funding on compliance with women-friendly policies,” the report notes.Women in Iraq have suffered the long-shadow of the ISIS war while some of the ISIS war criminals have made their way back to Europe and countries they came from. While Iraqis are still displaced in camps some ISIS members returned to Germany or other western countries where they sought to go back to their regular lives. No compensation has been paid by ISIS to the victims.
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