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Iraq: Basra's militias murder 'un-Islamic' women

Via NY Transfer News Collective  *  All the News that Doesn't Fit
 
[Women are being threatened all over Iraq -- not just in Basra. In
Baghdad, three University students were told they'd better start
wearing head-coverings on campus, or be killed. Their Christianity was
no excuse. Dozens of women have been attacked or killed in recent
months. -NYTr]


The Times of London - Dec 16, 2007
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article3056693.ece

Basra's militias murder 'un-Islamic' women

Tossed from a car and shot in cold blood

by Marie Colvin in Basra

IT WAS just after 11pm and the shopkeeper was closing up for the night
when a van screeched to a halt outside. The back doors flew open.
Someone inside threw a woman onto the street, he said. She was
lying on the road but she was still alive. A man lent out and shot a
machine-gun into her body.

As the van raced away, the shopkeeper ran over to her. She was aged 25
to 30 with long dark hair and was lying face up. There was so much
blood, he said. The police just took a photograph and put her in the
back of a van.

There have been 48 women killed in six months for un-Islamic
behaviour. The murders in the teeming southern port of Basra have
highlighted the weakness of the security forces and the strength of
Islamic militias as Britain prepares to hand over control to Iraqi
officials today.

In another case, two teenagers saw a woman beaten to death by five or
six men from the Mahdi Army, Basras most powerful militia. One picked
up a rock and crushed her skull. The teenagers were told that their
home and family would be destroyed if they betrayed the killers.

Any move by Turkish troops into Kurdish territory would be taken as a
declaration of war, the regions leader said

Gordon Brown told the Commons last week that Iraq was now a democracy,
that violence in Basra had fallen by 90% and that the Iraqis were
taking control over their own security.

However, Major-General Jalil Khalaf, the police chief, said the citys
28 militias were better armed than his men. They control the ports
which earns them huge sums of money he said.

As well as skimming profits from oil exports, they were importing
weapons from Iran.

You could smuggle a tank across that border if you wanted to, he added.

During four days of reporting independently in Basra -- the first
western journalist to do so for a British newspaper in almost two
years -- I met a Baghdad official who had come to investigate the port.
He was abducted, tortured and freed only after a gift was promised
to the kidnappers.

The objective of the UK forces in southern Iraq was to establish the
security needed for political development and economic reconstruction.
Major-General Graham Binns, the commander of British forces in Basra
province, acknowledged that we were unable to meet the aspirations of
the Iraqi people.

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