The Iraqis' Stories: A sorrowful, shunned casualty of the war

Chivalry compelled Wafa Abd's husband to cross the cordon line.

Qusai Hussein Saidie was driving home from work and discovered U.S. troops had blocked off his neighborhood during a search for gunmen. But he was worried about Wafa, then seven months pregnant.

"He told them, 'My wife is afraid,' " she says, recalling what neighbors told her later. "He came into the neighborhood because he feared for my life and honor."

In the home Abd shared with her husband's family, she heard shooting, but did not suspect anything until the Americans came to her house with Saidie's identification papers.

She started keening, startling one soldier so much that he raised his rifle to her face, she says. Then the troops tried to calm her and apologized. Maybe they had been wrong to open fire, Abd says they told her, but after all, her husband had crossed a security line.

Trammeled in sorrowful black shrouds, often bereft of financial support and social standing, widows are among the most vulnerable members of Iraq's fraying society. Alternately pitied and shunned, widows receive only a small stipend from the government — often as little as $25 a month.

The government has failed to protect inheritance rights, leaving the women vulnerable to traditions heavily biased toward male heirs. Their fatherless children are called orphans, stigmatizing them in a society in which intact families are paramount.

Government figures are sketchy. No one knows how many widows are wandering Iraq's violent landscape, but everybody here seems to know several. Anecdotal evidence — and the deaths of at least 40,000 Iraqis since the U.S.-led 2003 invasion — suggests they are increasing.

They are mostly a hidden consequence of the war, locked away from sight by grief or by protective, and occasionally predatory, relatives. Sometimes the ghostly, veiled figures can be seen lining up at government welfare offices or standing in traffic to beg.

Read the rest at the LA Times