City of Widows

Haifa Zangana, a former political prisoner of the Ba'ath regime, is the first to put the current plight of Iraqi women in context. She traces a long line of daring and vocal activists, resisting foreign aggression and despotism for the past 100 years, from a handful of turn-of-the-century poets, to 1960s activists in armed struggle (of which Zangana was a part), to suicide bombers today. Zangana contradicts the passive role into which Western media have cast Iraqi women and presents a forceful critique of foreign non-governmental organizations designed to hijack the initiatives of Iraqi women. Addressing the stark realities of Iraq under occupation, Zangana reveals Baghdad as a "city of widows," where more than three hundred thousand women have been left to head households. Just as the sanctions disproportionately affected women and children, the war and occupation have destroyed their ways of life. In the rebuilding of Iraq, as so often before, Zangana suggests, Iraqi women will be left to pick up the pieces of their country after yet another senseless imperial adventure.

HAIFA ZANGANA is an Iraqi political commentator, novelist, and former prisoner of Saddam Hussein’s regime. She is a weekly columnist for al-Quds newspaper and a commentator for the Guardian, Red Pepper, and al-Ahram Weekly. She lives in London.