Iraqi Women Speak Out about Life under Saddam's Dictatorship
National Press Club audience hears accounts of Saddam’s persecution
By Lindsey Brooks
Washington File Staff Writer
Washington — In 1991, Sabria Mahdi Naama and her children found themselves fleeing for their lives from their native land, Iraq. Her husband, Abbas Kareem Naama, had been gone for months and she had no idea if he was alive or dead.
Naama brought a National Press Club audience to tears October 4 as she recounted her family's arduous journey to freedom after months of hiding from Saddam Hussein's security forces.
The mother of five was part of a panel called, "The Unheard Voices of Iraqi Women," sponsored by the International Alliance for Justice, a network of 275 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) from over 120 countries. The group sought to put a spotlight on human rights violations that continue to be a hallmark of Saddam's rule in Iraq.
Naama and her husband, a former general in the Iraqi army, are Shiites, a Muslim majority in Iraq. After the Gulf War, General Naama participated in an uprising against Saddam Hussein in the southern part of the country, along with a few other senior military officials. Eventually, her husband was forced to flee their village to save his life, she said.
For months, Naama said she feared her husband had been executed by Saddam's regime. But, an even greater dread was that if he were alive, the Iraqi dictator would order the arrest of her children as a means to lure the general from hiding. Finally, Naama herself was forced to flee with her children.
"I bitterly left my homeland when it was absolutely unsafe for my kids and my family to stay even one day more," Naama said. She spoke in Arabic, and her daughter, Ersa, translated into English.
"Our guilt was that we protested the destruction of our life and the death of two members of our family ... We participated in the uprising to defend our life and our kids. When at last we arrived at the Rafha camp in the Saudi desert we were ghosts in the shape of human bodies," Naama said. "My kids were at the edge of death."
General Naama had been able to escape to the same camp and their family was reunited. After living in the desert camp for two years, they were moved to San Diego, California with a group of refugees.
Along with Naama, six other women from various regional, ethnic and religious backgrounds in Iraq shared their experiences living under Saddam's dictatorship.
Safia Al Souhail, the advocacy director for the Middle East and Islamic world at the International Alliance for Justice, said, "We, the women of Iraq, for the last three decades have suffered under an extraordinarily brutal regime, everybody in this panel has lost loved ones in various wars launched by Saddam…in the most aggressive and inhuman ways possible."
Al Souhail said Saddam's operatives in Beirut assassinated her father, Sheik Taleb Al Souhail, chief of the Bani Tamim tribe in Iraq, in 1994.
"We are here because of our common wounds and common aspirations, which is to see our country free from the repression of Saddam Hussein and his regime. Iraq under Saddam's regime has become a land of hopelessness, sadness, and fear. A country where people are ethnically cleansed ... rape is systematic . . . congenital malformation, birth defects, infertility, cancer and various disorders are the results of Saddam's gassing of his own people ... the killing and torturing of husbands in front of their wives and children occurs ... Iraq under Saddam has become a hell and a museum of crimes," Al Souhail said.
Nidal Shaikh Shallal related some of the ways Iraqi women have suffered at the hands of Saddam.
"The Iraqi woman has lost her loved ones — husbands, brothers and fathers," Shallal said. "The Iraqi woman has endured torture, murder, confinement, execution, and banishment, just like others in Iraqi society at the hands of Saddam Hussein's criminal gang."
"The heads of many women have been publicly cut off in the streets under the pretext of being liars, while in fact they mostly belonged to families opposing the Iraqi regime. Women, especially dissident women, have been raped by members of Saddam Hussein's gang ... The wives of dissidents have been either killed or tortured in front of their husbands in order to obtain confessions from their husbands . . . Women have been kidnapped as they walk in the streets by members of the gangs of Uday and Qusay [Saddam’s sons] and then raped," Shallal said.
On a personal level, Shallal and her husband had their possessions confiscated and were expelled from their home by the Iraqi regime. She was fired from her government job and her husband was jailed for four months and tortured by Iraqi military intelligence.
Shallal's brother was arrested in 1980 and her family still does not know what happened to him. Several of her cousins have been executed and as many as 882 male relatives and tribal members, the Jibour tribe, have been arrested and their fates are unknown, she said.
The panel at the news conference also included four Kurdish activists: Zakia Ismail Hakki, a lawyer and former president of the Kurdish Women's Foundation who became the first woman judge in Iraq; Hetau Ibrahim Ahmad; Paiman Halmat; and Dr. Katrin Michael. The four spoke of Saddam's persecution of the Kurdish population.
Halmat, a teacher, said, "It has been the Iraqi regime's policy to change the demography of Iraq, by eradicating the Kurdish population from areas that are deemed important in the north of the country. The regime has done this through forced deportation, arbitrary arrests and systematic torture."
Michael said, "In 1987 I was in the Bahdinan region when the government bombed us with chemical weapons. I am still suffering from that bombing to this day."
Michael said she has a vision of an Iraq without Saddam that would have a developed civil society that enshrines equal rights under the law; equal wages for men and women; and protection for women against violence and rape.
The women who spoke out at the National Press Club hope that their stories of life under Saddam will help the rest of world understand the suffering that Saddam’s regime has imposed on Iraqis. They also hope that the rest of the world will understand their yearning for a different, and much better, future for all Iraqis.
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