Freshly planted flowers surrounded the Baghdad Women’s centre, one of nine US-funded centers built across the city in 2004 that aimed to promote women’s rights in Iraq’s nascent democracy. I was there researching my book on women in Iraq, and to see how well US feminism was being received in this Muslim country. Western aid workers in dusty boots with multi-million contracts hovered around, anxious to teach Iraqi women everything from computer skills to political strategies in the hope of promoting women’s rights in the new Iraq.
However, a week later, the centre was closed, and two aid workers in similar centres in Southern Iraq were gunned down. Iraqi women stayed away, frightened by rumours that the US-run centres were showing pornography and conducting abortions.
Today, much like the centres, Iraqi women’s rights have been shuttered. As a result of civil war and chaos begun with the US-led invasion and toppling of Saddam Hussein, women have been driven into prostitution, are living under ISIS and there are hundreds of thousands of widows - the clock has been turned back 100 years for women.
