Surviving The Aftermath: The Legacy Of Sanctions On Maternal And Child Health In Post-2003 Iraq
The economic sanctions imposed on Iraq in 1990 had a devastating impact on its people, particularly women who faced unique forms of suffering during the 13-year-long sanctions. The shortage of basic necessities, including women's, had a severe impact on their health and well-being. The healthcare sector also suffered greatly,...
Speak: You are not alone
A young man, Muntazer Hamid Al-Thuwaini, a pharmacist working in a government hospital, is launching an application (talk), which is a mobile application through which he provides support and psychological support to those in need via the Internet.
"The complex political circumstances experienced by the Iraqi state since its establishment...
In Kurdistan, Turkey misses target and faces Iraqi backlash
It is a heavy morning in Sulaymaniyah, on the 8th of April 2023. A light breeze is blowing, carrying clouds of dusty sand, like a bad omen. The air is heavy and the surrounding mountains are invisible. Life was going on normally in the city, although it slightly slowed down on the third week of ramadan. In the outskirts of the provincial capital, Suleymaniya’s airport’s vicinity is peaceful. The flight to Medina took off on time at night. Nothing...
Twenty Years After: Reflections on the Consequences of the US Invasion of Iraq
As we live through the twentieth anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq, The Red Line Media is proud to present a series of articles exploring the complex and ongoing impact of this historic event. From the political upheaval and constitutional challenges faced by the Iraqi people, to the...
Black Gold: a curse afflicting the poor, and a blessing for the corrupt
According to official figures, Basra, the third largest city in Iraq, located in the far south, is inhabited by approximately 2.7 million people. In reality, the number is much higher, but we must bear in mind the inadequacy of field survey procedures, the lack of an electronic governance system,...
The echo of Rojhelat’s “Jin Jiyan Azadi” slogan reaches Iraqi Kurdistan
While East Kurdistan’s and Iran’s protests are gaining worldwide attention and international support, little support has emerged from the Iraqi Kurdish community. In the Iraqi Kurdish region (KRG) intra-Kurdish rivalry between the Kurdistan Union Party (PUK) and the Democratic Party of Kurdistan (PDK) as well as these parties’ political dependencies to neighboring States has limited the expressions of support to this struggle by the public of the Kurdistan Region.
Jina Amini, also known by her Persian-imposed name Mahsa Amini...
Between Baghdad and Erbil, the impossible budget agreement
The long-running budget dispute between Iraq’s federal government and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) is rooted in incompatible approaches to federalism in the post-Ba’athist state. Over the past decade, Baghdad’s centralizing efforts have clashed with Erbil’s desire for stronger regional control over its own affairs, especially with regard to...
War games and French corruption: the hidden face of terrorism: an interview with Marc Eichinger
Former private intelligence agent turned whistleblower, Marc Eichinger recently published a book where he exposes several cases of corruption between France and Iraq involving Turkish and Iraqi Kurdish politicians as well as French companies in the funding of terrorism as they engaged in oil trade with ISIS in the...
Defying impunity: independent news outlet challenges transparency flaws in KRG
Through an unprecedented initiative, the independent media editorial board of the Iraqi Kurdish outlet Peregraf have decided to file a lawsuit against Iraqi Kurdistan’s Regional Government (KRG) using… its own laws against it. Last summer, Editor-in-chief Surkew Mohammed had initially made an official request to the KRG in order...
Iranian Bombings in Iraqi Kurdistan: Rising Violence and the Beginning of a Serious Conflict
Two months after Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian-Kurdish student, was beaten to death by the authorities for not having worn her veil correctly, the revolution continues in Iran. So does the repression of the Mullah’s regime which, according to an Iran Human Rights (IHR) report from 16 November, has...
Mental Health
Tribal Violence in Iraq: a psychological perspective
News of violence in Iraq has become routine, and it is now rare to witness a day without a case of violence. Political violence is what draws most attention, not due to its scarcity, but for other factors related to the division of society into factions and groups. Tribal...
Bullying in Iraq: the law of the jungle leaves no one untouched
“Just as some of those sentenced to death die of terror hours before their execution, my brother Ammar Ali died after being isolated from the outside world due to bullying. His congenital birth defect in his brain had also exacerbated his torment.” With these words, Tahseen Ali summarized his...
Iraq, a psychiatric void
In Iraq, depression and psychiatric illness are disregarded although they affect large sections of the population. They are even associated with shame and weakness. The rare medical structures present in the country do not offer suitable treatments to the men and women traumatized by the violence in society.
Near Sadr...
Politics of anger in Iraqi Kurdistan
In Iraq, Kurdistan and in the wider Middle East, anger is in the air. This can be perceived through several events occurring in the region, either minor or important: demonstrations, instability, trends of immigration, heated social media discourses and low voting turnouts. The author of this piece chose to...
Being LGBT in Iraq: a mental health nightmare
“I feel that my body no longer belongs to me”
Zainab is a 22 years old lesbian women from Baghdad. Her family forced her to marry a man. She was repeatedly raped by him. When she tried to return to her family's home she was subjected to physical violence after...
Politics
The Tishreen movement and its political challenges
An entire year has passed since the last parliamentary elections and Iraq still hasn’t formed a government while the parliament remains more divided than ever. Meanwhile, the Tishreen movement, which shook the very foundations of the Iraqi State in 2019, has almost completely stalled, moving from a stage of...
The Men Around Al-Sadr
The story of a hitman who (almost) always escapes justice
by: Ali Faez
When the political regime of Iraq fell on April 9, 2003, the dissolution of the former Iraqi military heralded the emergence of armed groups outside the scope of the state, groups which would form a parallel state thriving...
Al-Sadr’s intense month and The Kurdish Street
Since 1991 the Kurdish street has been disconnected from the Arab one in Iraq, following social and political dynamics specific to the Kurdistan Region (KRG). With the al-Sadr uprisings, we once again saw the residents of the KRG play a more or less passive role towards the deadlock conflict...
Iraqi minorities face upheaval amid renewed Iraqi crisis
Religious communities in Iraq have been severely weakened by the escalating tension between major political forces, which have dominated the country and undermined the rights of these minorities both at parliamentary and social levels.
The crisis-ridden situation is pushing them to a state of total despair. The feeling that a...
Al-Maliki and Al-Sadr Are Taking Iraq to the Brink of the Abyss: What Is Iran’s Role?
As the tension does not seem to wane in Iraq as the Sadrist militant fall back once again from the Green zone. As Iraq’s top militia-backed political rivals count their gains and losses, the streets of Iraqi cities are once again filled with blood, destruction and chaos, while governmental...
Mental health
Being LGBT in Iraq: a mental health nightmare
“I feel that my body no longer belongs to me”
Zainab is a 22 years old lesbian women from Baghdad. Her family forced her to marry a man. She was repeatedly raped by him. When she tried to return to her family's home she was subjected to physical violence after...
Environment
Hunting and poaching in Iraqi Kurdistan: a plague for the wildlife
Contrary to a widely held area, Iraq’s autonomous region of Kurdistan does not hold a large population of wild animals. This is partly because most species in the region are heavily exposed to hunting and therefore threatened with disappearance. Environmental organizations as well as citizens concerned about the preservation...
Kurdistan : from lush forests to dry desert
To this day, no country on earth has ever prevented aggressions toward nature. Humans are responsible for countless damages perpetrated against the wilderness. Considered as the “lungs of the earth”, green spaces keep shrinking, mostly due to manmade fires. Here, in Iraqi Kurdistan, this reality is all the most...
Scarcity and over-salinity: Basra’s water dilemma
Due to corruption and negligence of Basra's local authority, the city of water and oil, referred to as the jewel of Iraq's south or the Venice of Middle East, was declared a devastated city in the summer of 2018 due to the contamination of its fresh water supplies and...
Dirty business: Baghdad’s wasteland affects thousands’ health
While the Iraqi mafia steadily invested in the trash business in, patients and children in particular keep flooding hospitals. Waste trafficking generates a lot of money in Iraq through a shady partnership between governmental agencies and unscrupulous private operators. Meanwhile, regulation organizations remain silent. In Al-Rasheed camp, the population...
Are the Iraqi marshes reaching a dead end?
Every year, Iraq’s vast wetlands in the south of the country see their water levels and quality naturally fluctuate. During the winter, the marshes did not have the same aspect as today, as a dry and hot summer had hit Mesopotamia. One after another, unprecedented droughts are heating the...
Elections
The Tishreen movement, from protest to Parliament
Serving the future
October 2019’s protests generated unprecedented mass protests in eight governorates of central and southern Iraq. Tainted with blood and tears, these popular marshes subsequently structured themselves into organized protests while the government remained blind to their demands of reforms. In light of an unprecedented governmental repression, the...
Iraqi elections: Clash of Visions and unclear objectives
While the latest vote casting in Iraq reshuffled the balance of power in the Majlis al-Nuwab (council of representatives), the electoral battle failed to bring anything more than a new stalemate. Indeed, the hopes some Iraqis still had of obtaining concrete reforms in the near future were quickly dashed...
Tribe or Party ? In Anbar, is the new electoral code reshuffling the cards ?
In the province of al-Anbar, the aspect of tribalism still has a lot of influence within society… and on politics. This governorate represents roughly a third of the Iraqi territory, with a population of one million eight hundred thousand inhabitants (less than 5% of Iraq’s total population. Dozens of...
Three month after the Iraqi elections, the disappointed hopes of minorities
On October 10, 2021, during anticipated legislative elections, Iraqis gathered to elect the 329 new deputies of the Majlis al Nuwab, the national parliament. These elections were organized by the Iraqi government in order to calm the anger of the Iraqi street that emerged during massive demonstrations in October...
Women
Women in Iraqi Kurdistan: an asphyxiating situation
While Iraqi-kurdish women and men shared the burden of struggling for existence against Sadam’s regime to secure autonomy in the early nineties, patriarchal values have not ceased to dominate society as women remain treated like property rather than partners.
In the last days of 2018, a woman and her three...
Iraq’s institutionalization of gender inequality
While Iraqi families are usually led by men, studies have shown that those with women in charge are more likely to be poor than others. According to the United Nations Fund for Women, women-led families that do not receive remittances from their relatives (usually men) have stronger poverty rates...
Every woman’s nightmare: honour killing in South Iraq
Basra, in Southern Iraq: a city and province rich with black gold but dominated by militiamen. The province’s capital sometimes erupts into tribal conflicts while remaining under the yoke of religious parties loyal to Iran since the US invasion in 2003.Basra hosts Iraq's only access to the sea, on...
Iraqi women among brick factories in Nahrawan
They broke the restrictions and defied social norms. Many Iraqi women were compelled to engage in professions that were usually monopolized by men. Working in difficult professions is for them the only way to earn a living. Some of them work in brick factories on the outskirts of Baghdad...
Honor killings, virginity and surgery in Iraq
Many Iraqi women resort to patching their hymens, as a result of a strict social upbringing that requires girls to keep their "treasure" unscathed. In a way, this situation reflects severe schizophrenic issues in Iraqi society, which links between chastity and the hymen of a woman with the honour and dignity of her entire family..
This thin membrane, the "talisman" that young women must exhibit in front of a new husband, is the "registered sign" of her chastity, purity and a proof that she has been capable of protecting herself from any "unlawful" sexual conduct, until she was married.
Because virginity is such a red line in Iraqi society, many myths and legends are woven around it. It is a rich subject that men and women fantasize upon voraciously even though they do without any clear scientific approach.
Fixing the family’s honour
A pharmacist called Ahmed al-Qaisi explained to The Red Line how the business of hymen surgery was built around the women’s need to protect her dignity. Mr. Al-Qaisi described how doctors from Al-Karama hospital would practice hymen surgeries on a regular...
Ahwar women: big challenges and endless dreams
Between the reeds, Umm Kazem, 64, spends most of her time in the Iraqi marshes, known as the Ahwar wetlands, in order to deliver milk to her customers. Every day, this resident of the Chibayish district (70 km southeast of Al Nasiriyeh, Dhi Qar province’s capital) makes her way...
Yazidi women face structural challenges after ISIS
Sinjar is a district of the Nineveh province located West of Mosul, in the Iraqi desert near the Syrian border. It is the most prominent stronghold of the Yazidis, who are surrounded by Arab tribes. On the Sinjar Mountain, there are small villages whose inhabitants are mostly Yazidis. Back...
Smuggling
Drugs in Iraq: a disease crippling society
The Iraqi border authorities and security forces are incapable of taking suitable measures to tackle drug smuggling and manufacturing. Due to the unstable situation in Iraq, the country has become a major passage for the smuggling of narcotic substances through Iraq to neighboring countries. This troubling issue has a...
Iraq’s fragile borders remain easy to infiltrate
Years after the defeat of the Islamic State, the large iraqi-syrian border is still very fragile and easy to break through. Whether they exploit the vast emptiness of the desert or the corrupt militias and border guards, IS terrorists have found many ways of maintaining their mobility on the...
Currency smuggling: the largest spill of cash in Iraq’s modern history
Last summer, writer and blogger Hiyam Al-Khuzai claimed in a tweet that the fight against corruption required an end to currency auctions, oil smuggling and for the government to assert firm control on ports and border offices. This statement puts forth the poorly known issue of currency auctions in...
Organ trafficking in Iraq: dealers in Baghdad and smugglers in Kurdistan
Decades of war in Iraq resulted in an almost collapse of state institutions. Competition for power, coupled with weak government performances, rampant corruption and growing unemployment led to serious dysfunctionalities within Iraqi institutions and security forces. This situation facilitated the expansion of international organized crime, including the trafficking of...
The plague of smuggled medicine in Iraq
At first sight, traffic of goods and people between Iraq and its neighbors seems to be normal and relatively under control. Yet, there is a silent plague making its way through the borders of the country: smuggled medicine. These trafficking operations rely on intermediaries on both sides of Iraq’s...
COVID-19
COVID-19 triggers Nineveh’s women solidarity actions
Just like other Iraqi governorates, Mosul’s province, Nineveh, enforced health precautionary measures. But there were a few specificities to this area, as a result of the destruction of the infrastructure and social and economic life by the war, which made this sanitary campaign much more difficult and showed how unprepared and dysfunctional the government was to handle such a crisis.
The women of Mosul and its suburbs did not give in to the difficulties and took part in many humanitarian and social activities to alleviate the effects of the spread of the pandemic, which caused many deaths. The pandemic has indeed allowed women to show inspiring examples of creativity despite the government failure to adequately manage the pandemic.
Women confronting Coronavirus
While many international and local initiatives attempt to empower women, Mosul women continue to suffer persecution and a curtailment of their role in a society described as patriarchal at all political, economic and social levels. In Iraq, they are often considered second-class citizens.
Hanan Omar is a pseudonym for a 35-year-old widow from Nineveh Governorate. In her interview with The Red Line,...
Thi Qar is crushed between the Coronavirus and corruption
As the coronavirus pandemic entered its second year, Iraq struggles to cope with an unending health crisis. While the peak of the epidemic is behind, a glimpse into the way it was managed in Thi Qar province will help shed some light on the high level of dysfunctionality within...
Covid-19
Has the Iraqi elite used the COVID-19 crisis to paralyze protests in Iraq?
These popular protests turned Iraq’s political balance upside down, impelling many changes on a political and even cultural level, hoping to swipe away a political elite responsible for corruption and the persistence of violence. The demonstrations continued until the emergence of the Corona epidemic in Iraq. Almost corollary to the surge of number of infections, protest squares such as Tahrir Square in Baghdad (the demonstration’s epicentre in the capital) witnessed a significant decrease of protests.
Political researcher Maan Al-Zubaidi explained that, "the use of violence against protesters contributed to reducing their gathering." But he also pointed out that "the Corona epidemic had a negative role in the protests due to the major concerns that the epidemic would grow significantly in...
Cross-institution response to COVID-19: not bad but not enough
Collaborating to confront Covid 19
Today, the halls of Al-Shaab international stadium no longer receive athletes. Rather, it has turned into a quarantine area for people infected with Coronavirus after government hospitals were overwhelmed. Assistant director general of Rusafa health department in East Baghdad, Hassanein Al-Mousawi said that 11 sports...