Violating Iraqi Women

...Next week, MADRE , an international women’s human rights organization, will release a report that documents the widespread use of rape and other forms of torture against female detainees in Iraq by U.S. and Iraqi forces. The report includes testimonies collected by the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI) of numerous rape survivors. Since November 2005, OWFI has conducted a Women’s Prison Watch project and has found that "torture and rape are common procedure of investigation in police stations run by the militias affiliated with the government, mostly the Mahdi and Badr militias," according to their summer 2006 report. These are the same sectarian Shiite militias that have been prosecuting Iraq’s civil war, the same militias that stepped into the power vacuum created by the U.S. overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003 and the same militias that have been systematically attacking Iraqi women in their bid to establish an Islamist theocracy (...) By 2005, the U.S. was actively aiding the militias. As the "cakewalk" envisioned by U.S. war planners quickly devolved into the quagmire is the Iraq War, the U.S. began to cultivate Shiite militias to help battle the Sunni-led insurgency. According to Newsweek, the plan was dubbed the "Salvador Option," recalling the use of militias by the U.S. to bolster right-wing regimes in 1980s Central America. Today, the Mahdi Army controls the police forces of Baghdad and Basra , Iraq’s two largest cities. The Badr Brigade is headquartered in Iraq’s Ministry of Interior, which directs the country’s police, intelligence and paramilitary units...

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