From CITY OF WIDOWS

From City of Widows: An Iraqi Woman's Account of War and Resistance by Haifa Zangana

"The blunders of the US administration in Iraq [...] may be located in [a] colonial policy, uninformed by a real understanding of the Iraqi people. The main misconception is to perceive Iraqi women as silent, powerless victims in a male-dominated society, in urgent need of sexual and political liberation. This image fits conveniently into the overall picture of the Iraqi people as passive victims [... .] The United States confused the need of a people to get rid of a tyrannical regime with the right to impose a new colonial order" (10-11).

"[...] the promotion of Iraqi women's rights as a justification for the invasion has proven to be the mother of all failures. Instead, Iraqi women have lost all they had achieved as activists before the invasion, and they comprise thousands of the 650,000 casualties" (16-17).

Haifa, like our character Huda, left Iraq because she and her family were persecuted by the Ba'athist regime. She left in 1974. As she notes in her introduction, the Ba'athist period "invokes for me the images of tortured and executed friends [...] and the abuse and harassment of my family and me" (16).