Six women who have fled their homes in the south, central, and northern Kurdish areas of Iraq told a London news conference of deaths and disappearances of their relatives, the burning of their homes, and of living day to day under threat.
They were Arab, Kurdish, Assyrian, Turkoman and Shiite Muslim. And all spoke of executions, torture and oppression in their communities.
"We are here begging the support of the free world to liberate us from the nightmare that we have been living in for the past three decades," said Safia al-Souhail, who accuses the Iraqi government of the 1994 assassination of her father, head of the prominent Bani-Tamim tribe, who had been involved in planning a coup against Saddam.
"Although men have received the biggest share of the tyrant's brutality," she said, "women end up suffering the consequence."
The wives of thousands of missing Iraqi men struggle to provide for their families and cannot remarry, even though they are sure their husbands have been killed, said al-Souhail.
Fatima Bahr al Ulum, a small, soft spoken young woman whose head was covered by a scarf, read out a list of 22 members of her prominent Shiite family many of them scholars and imams saying they had been arrested shortly after the start of the 1991 Iraqi uprising that followed the Gulf War.
Many have never been seen again; others remain in jail, she said.
One of the most popular arguments against the war has been that it would somehow be bad for the civilians of Iraq. Those making that argument assume that the US will bomb indiscriminately and that the civillan death toll will be immense, even though everything argues against that.
But they never seem to mention what kind of life the people there have now, from which they'd be freed if we fight and win. It's not so much a question of whether war is bad; it is. But not fighting a war would condemn millions of Iraqis to continue living in hell on earth, and that would be worse than war, for them. Which is why these women all support an attack. They don't just want Iraq disarmed; they want Saddam deposed.
How many of those who oppose this war do you think will listen seriously to these women?
