We can’t say for certain. The women of the family Hussein – his two wives and three daughters – led sheltered lives out of the limelight. But in the psycopathic Saddam clan, they were hardly peaceful lives. The husbands of two of the daughters, Raghad and Rana, defected to Jordan in the late 1990s, then were lured back to Iraq, where Saddam’s son, Odai, engineered their slayings.
Unlike the Saddam men, though, neither of Saddam’s wives nor his daughters are on U.S. lists of wanted regime members. They were not part of the regime’s apparatus and from what little we know they don’t appear now to have a lot of ill-gotten money. According to the Washington Post, a relative who saw the daughters in June “he described a life much as Raghad later would describe it: No electricity. Cramped quarters. Uncertainty.”
Though there are gaps and unknowns, there are some interesting tidbits about the women and what they’ve been doing, especially since the war started.
A brief report that originated with a Baghdad newspaper says the U.S. has contacted Saddam’s first wife in hopes of delivering the bodies of her dead sons, Odai and Qusai to her.
So where is she? Reports vary. Some say that after making their way to Syria and being deported back to Iraq, Saddam’s first wife, Sajida Khayrallah, and daughters Raghad, Rana and Hala went to Mosul (where Odai and Qusai were slain) and are under the protection of a tribal chieftain there.
That might fit with this bit of information from the Telegraph in London:
“… one of Saddam’s second cousins has requested the release of the bodies of Odai and Qusai Hussein for burial. Ezzedine Mohamed Hassan al-Majid said he made the request in a letter to US provisional authority administrator L. Paul Bremer…
“Al-Majid said his wife and four children were killed in an attack led by Odai and Qusai, but he still felt obliged to make the request so he could arrange for their burial in the family cemetery in Tikrit, Saddam’s birthplace.”
Another report, however, places Sajida and her daughters in the United Arab Emirates, a small Persian Gulf state.
In June, Sajida and her daughters sought asylum in England, but the British government of Tony Blair, the major U.S. ally in the war, was having none of it.
The Washington Post has a rundown on the activities of Saddam’s daughters, as does this story from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The Post earlier published this profile of Sajida.
Saddam’s second wife – a former flight attendant he apparently married secretly in the late 1980s – is said to be living in Beirut.
That the female side of the dictator’s family seems to have been left with little means of support – while Saddam and his sons were looting the national treasury for billions – provides a window into the larger issue of the role of women in Iraq. Under Saddam, Iraq was a secular society and in the 1970s and 1980s its women were the envy of women in other Arab nations. That began to change with the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the region following the Iran-Iraq war, and women ultimately were given little role in public life in Iraq.
Now, as the link above notes, there are reports of increasing numbers of sex crimes directed against women during the general breakdown of law in the wake of the war. Also, a report from Human Rights Watch says that in Iraq, "There is a long-standing cultural stigma and shame attached to rape that positions victims as the wrongdoer and too frequently excuses or treats leniently the perpetrator."
Earlier this month, about 90 prominent Iraqi women met in Baghdad to begin developing an approach toward ensuring their rights in whatever government ultimately emerges in their country.
"We were ignored in the past," Ala Talabani, a women's union leader in northern Iraq who headed the constitutional workshop, said. "Now we want the voice of Iraqi women to be heard at all levels."
However, it looks like the women will have to attempt to change not only Iraqi tradition, but perhaps the views of the U.S.-led civilian administration in Iraq qs well. Talabani criticized the U.S. administration for not including more women in the upcoming "transitory governing council" which US overseer Paul Bremer said he will unveil in the next two weeks. "They will be very, very few," she said.
In what might be one small step forward, the coalition government announced yesterday the appointment of a first group of 14 Iraqi women as security guards. The women will be working in the Facilities Protection Services, a 4,500-strong team of Iraqis set up to guard public buildings, including schools, hospitals and power stations. Five US female soldiers trained the 14 women in combat techniques, and how to handle weapons and run checkpoints.
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