Women Lose Ground in the New Iraq

Hope and Fear

Before the war, Sundus Abbas, 38, was a researcher at a governmental organization. After the war, she became a women's rights activist.

After Saddam Hussein was forced out of power, many women like Abbas appeared on television talk shows and wrote newspaper articles challenging traditional views on marriage and other family issues and demanding that women be granted a greater role in government.

"They were there asking for their rights loudly and clearly," said Maysoon al-Damluji, a member of parliament.

There were signs of success. Twenty-five percent of the seats in the new National Assembly were reserved for women. Under Hussein, only one ministry was headed by a woman, Damluji said. Now, of the 38 ministry heads, four are women.

Iraqi women had been earning university degrees since the 1920s. Many earned master's degrees and doctorates and became physicians, engineers and lawyers.

Then came the 1980s war with Iran and the embargo imposed after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Hussein, who began embracing Islamic and tribal traditions as a way to consolidate power, forbade women younger than 45 to travel abroad without a male relative.

Encouraged by Bush, women began to reassert themselves after 2003. But the collapse of security, the absence of the rule of law and the presence of extremist groups have weakened the budding movement, activists said. In the past year, its leaders have received death threats. Politicians have accused them of working in collusion with enemy countries, and police officers have harassed them, activists said.

On June 4, Abbas received an anonymous e-mail at her Baghdad office warning her to leave Iraq within 10 days. Three days later, another e-mail said she would be killed for not complying with the first threat.

She stayed home and canceled her scheduled appearances. A third threat came June 10 in a telephone text message. She recalled thinking that she did not want to be killed in front of her parents, who had already lost a daughter in a U.S. airstrike.

"I left with a feeling of humiliation and bitterness," she wrote in an e-mail from an undisclosed location. "Just imagine, I left my home, my family, my work and my city, for nowhere."

'Psychologically Tired'

Aseel Bahjet and her mother shot nervous glances at each other as the 23-year-old spoke to a stranger in a Karrada perfume shop on a recent afternoon. Her mother wore an abaya. Bahjet wore a long black skirt, a black sweater and a head scarf. The shopkeeper closed the door so that no one would see a foreigner talking to the young woman.

Bahjet, a petite figure with pale skin and big brown eyes, recently graduated from Baghdad University with an engineering degree. But she doesn't know what to do with it.