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Yanar Mohammed Talks About The Impact Of The U.S. Occupation On The Lives of Iraqi Women
I first started corresponding with Yanar Mohammed, founder of the Organisation of Women's Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), early this spring when I received a frantic email from Jennifer Fasulo of the Working Committee in Support of Iraqi Women's Rights explaining that OWFI urgently needed funds to rent a shelter in Baghdad for women at risk of honor killings. The letter asked that checks be made out to Ms. Fasulo personally, so that she could wire the money directly, because the usual method of donating via the internet would not be fast enough. Although I was familiar with OWFI's work, I had never heard of Ms. Fasulo, so I emailed Ms. Mohammed to ask if this was a legitimate request. She promptly assured me that it was, explaining that some expected funds had fallen through, leaving OWFI without enough funds to pay the annual rent of $3200 needed for the shelter. Shocked at how little was needed, I immediately sent a check to Ms. Fasulo and am happy to say that the funds were raised.
Over the course of the spring, Ms. Mohammed and I continued to correspond, and I was struck by how easily we communicated, two women, who had never met, half a world apart. In a true example of how communality transcends borders, it turns out that both of us are in our mid-forties with teenage sons. We both have degrees in architecture and have spent most of our working lives as artists turning our energies these last few years to ending violence against women, she by founding OWFI and I by founding the Feminist Peace Network. Ms. Mohammed, a long time activist, working against the Baathist regime as well as for women's rights, was born in Baghdad in 1960. Finding that she could no longer make a living with the economic sanctions against Iraq in the 1990's, she moved to Canada and continued her activism from there. Last spring she returned to Iraq for four months to work directly with women during the U.S. occupation of Iraq. We spoke recently about her trip, the current the situation for women in Iraq, and what she...