Three decades of wars, massacres and sectarian killings have left Iraq with as many as a million widows, by Iraqi government count. Hameeda Ayed is one of them.
At 45, with three children, she is part of a vast sisterhood in a tortured land, and for the more than 100,000 who lost their husbands in the U.S.-led invasion and violent aftermath, the struggling postwar government is of little help.Ayed is entitled to 150,000 dinars (about $130) a month from the government, plus 15,000 dinars (about $12) for each of her children.
But after two years of chasing after official papers and signatures on her application, having no friends in high places to grease the wheels for her, she says she is giving up; the endless standing in line was making her neglect the children, aged 10, 12 and 15. So she makes ends meet by selling snacks and sodas from her home in a Shiite enclave of southern Baghdad where she moved from a Sunni area after her husband died in the tit-for-tat killings of 2007."
Our life has been turned into misery and desperation," she said. "This is what we got from occupation and the dreams of democracy: orphans, widows, homeless, displaced and fugitives."Nahdah Hameed, the government's point person on women's social affairs, puts the number of widows at about 1 million, and even though the post-invasion violence has wound down, sporadic shootings and bombings continue to widow Iraqi women.
