Under the US Occupation, the situation of Iraqi women has continued to deteriorate. In addition to torture and sexual violence perpetuated by U.S. Occupation forces, a great number of Iraqi women and girls are kept locked up in their homes by a very real fear of abduction and criminal abuse. Since the invasion of Iraq , Iraqi women have been denied their human right, including the right to health, education and employment.

Prior to the 1991 U.S. war and the 13 years of the genocidal sanctions, Iraqi women enjoyed unquestionable quality rights to education and health. Iraqi women had the most progressive human rights in the region and Iraqi women were the first Arab women to hold high positions in academia, law, medicine and government. Before the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq , Iraqi women made up 40 per cent of the public-sector work force. Men and women received equal pay for work, education and health care were free at all levels. In the 1980s, a government program to eradicate illiteracy among Iraqi women was exceedingly successful, and women have traditionally enjoyed freedoms not found in other Arab and Muslim countries.

In addition, Iraq ’s Constitution was the most advanced in the Middle East , if not the Muslim World. Women rights are enshrined in the Constitution, which was dissolved (together with Iraqi Police and Security) by the U.S. Occupation and replaced by a U.S-crafted “Interim Constitution”, produced without women’s representation, which deprives Iraqi women of their rights and dignity. In today’s Iraq , crimes and abuse against women were back to the levels before independence from colonial Britain 1958. The crime of rape was capital offence under Iraq ’s Constitution.

Since the beginning of the U.S. Occupation, there has been a dramatic increase in sexual assaults and violations of women’s rights by U.S. forces in Iraq . Many women have been taken hostages tortured, and sexually abused. The sexual abuse, rape and torture against Iraqi women is not confined only to Western media-loved Abu Ghraib prison, but is “happening all across Iraq”, said Amal Kadhim Swadi, an Iraqi lawyers representing women detainees at Abu Ghraib. “Sexualized violence and abuse committed by U.S. troops goes far beyond a few isolated cases”, she added.

Crimes of sexual violence, and torture by U.S. forces against Iraqi men, women and children were kept secret from the public until Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker magazine published photographs alongside extracts from the damning report of General Antonio Taguba. The U.S. administration blamed the crimes on a few black sheep. Of course it is not true. Orders come from the top of U.S. military and civilian leaderships. Unfortunately there has been no public outrage in the U.S. or in Europe to condemn these appalling practices against Iraqi women. Is it because of the European-American “shared values”?

There is credible evidence that the highest echelons of the Pentagon and the civilian Bush administration proved the brutality against the Iraqi people. According to ‘The Torture Papers’, edited by Karen Greenberg, director of the centre on law and security at the New York University School of Law, the U.S. government is guilty of a “systematic decision to alter the use of methods of coercion and torture that lay outside of accepted and legal norms”. “ It is ironic that a person such as [Lynndie England, who pleaded guilty], with little education, no authority, and zero training as a prison guard, becomes the poster child for our depravity, while the authors of the American policy toward Iraqi detainees remain virtually untouched by the scandal”, reported Paul Vitello of Newsday. The U.S. Justice Department essentially immunised military and intelligence officials from liability for physical torture. “ In fact, some officials who either knew of the abuse or should have known about it have been retained or promoted”, reported the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on April 30, 2005. Systematic torture and sexual abuse were used to interrogate prisoners in U.S-run prisons in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and elsewhere.

Several documents released on 07 March 2005 by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) show 13 cases of rape and abuse of female detainees. The documents revealed that no action was taken against any soldier or civilian official as a result. “We have to start to ask the question of whether there is a whole layer of abuse out there that we are not seeing because the evidence of abuse has been covered up”, said ACLU staff attorney Jameel Jaffer . The documents also provide further evidence that U.S. troops have destroyed evidence of abuse and torture in order to avoid a repetition of last year's Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal.

Aidan Delgado, a 23-year-old U.S. Army reservist with the 320th Military Police Company told Bob Herbert of the New York Times recently, that he “had witnessed an Army sergeant lashed a group of children with a steel Humvee antenna, and a Marine corporal planted a vicious kick in the chest of a kid about 6 years old”. After he was deployed to Abu Ghraib Prison, Mr. Delgado told Herbert: “The violence [in Abu Ghraib] was sickening, some inmates were beaten nearly to death”. In one of the many detainees’ protests at Abu Ghraib, the “ Army authorized lethal force. F our [unarmed] detainees were shot to death”, said Delgado.

An eyewitness female detainee at Abu Ghraib, who identified herself as ‘Noor’, told Al-Jazeera that ‘U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison raped women and, in many occasions, forced them to strip naked in public’. She admitted seeing ‘many female detainees got pregnant’. Iraqi lawyer Iman Khamas, of International Occupation Watch Centre, said; “One former detainee had recounted the alleged rape of her cell mate in Abu Ghraib.” “[The detainee] had been raped 17 times in one day”, said Khamas.

Professor Huda Shaker Al-Nuaimi, of Baghdad University Political Science Department, told Luke Harding of the Guardian on 12 May 2004, that; ‘U.S. soldiers in Iraq have raped, sexually humiliated and abused several Iraqi female detainees in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison’. Al-Nuaimi told Harding that she knows of ‘Noor's’ case and other Iraqi females that were arrested, taken to Abu Ghraib prison and raped by the US Military Police. ‘Iraqi women here are afraid and shy of talking about such subjects’, she added. Crimes of rape were very rare before the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Rape is shameful crimes, and was introduced to the Muslim World by Western colonialists as a tool of coercion and intimidation.

The U.S. Army report on Iraqi prisoners abuse by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba (the Taguba Report) confirmed these accounts, including ‘Noor's’ account and said that U.S. guards sexually abused female detainees at Abu Ghraib. The report found “numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses” constituting “systematic and illegal abuse of [Iraqi] detainees” at Abu Ghraib.

In addition to sexual violence and physical torture, a new comprehensive report documents the use of psychological torture on Iraqi men, women and children by U.S. forces released on May 01, 2005 by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), a British independent organisation. The report shows that “psychological torture has been at the centre of treatment and interrogation of detainees [in Iraq and elsewhere]”. The most inhumane and damaging “[t]echniques of psychological torture used have included sensory deprivation, isolation, sleep deprivation, forced nudity, the use of military working dogs to instil fear, cultural and sexual humiliation, mock executions, and the threat of violence or death toward detainees or their loved ones”, reveals the report.

Moreover, Iraqi women and their children are being taken hostages by U.S. forces and used as ‘bargaining chips’. On 11 April 2005, the Guardian reported, that U.S. forces were accused of violating international law by taking Iraqi women hostages to force their male relatives to surrender. After taking the women (mother and daughter) from their home in Baghdad, U.S. soldiers left a note on the gate: “Be a man Muhammad Mukhlif and give yourself up and then we will release your sisters. Otherwise they will spend a long time in detention”. One wonders who is the one to “be a man”, U.S. soldiers who are abusing defenceless women or Mr. Muhammad, who is only defending his country against foreign invaders?

Iraqi women are arrested, detained, abused and tortured not because of anything they have done, but to force their close relatives (spouses, sons and brothers) to collaborate with the Occupation and to inform against the Resistance. Contrary to the Geneva Conventions, which stipulate that no one can “be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed”. The practices, which have been condemned by the UN and human rights organisations, are widely used by the Israeli Army against Palestinian men, women and children in occupied Palestine.

The Italian journalist, Giuliana Sgrena, of the Italian daily il Manifesto, reported that, as usual U.S. Occupation forces raided the home of Mithal Al-Hassan, a 55 years old engineer, and arrested both her husband and son. “The soldiers later ransacked the apartment and stole their saving. Denounced as part of a vendetta, Mithal was condemned without trial to eighty days of horror in the company of other women prisoners who, like her, were subjected to abuse and torture. She has since spotted her tormentors on the internet”.

In another interview, Mithal added; “After that, they took me to a detention centre [near Baghdad International Airport]. There, I heard a young woman crying out from her cell, telling an American soldier to leave her alone. She said, ‘I am a Muslim woman’. Her voice was high-pitched and shaky. Her husband, who was in a cell down the hall, called out, ‘She is my wife. She has nothing to do with this’. He hit the bars of his cell with his fists until he fainted. The Americans poured water over his face and made him wake up. When her screams became louder, the soldiers played music over the speakers. Finally, they took her to another room. I couldn't hear anything more”, Ms. Mithal told Tara McKelvey of American Prospect. The courage and clarity of Mithal substantiate the ongoing U.S. brutality against the Iraqi women.