Iraqi women in 2007
Posted: Wednesday, June 20, 2007 3:31 PM
Filed Under:
Baghdad, Iraq
By Michelle Neubert, NBC News Producer
I was convinced we were at the wrong gate at the Amman airport for our much delayed departure for Iraq.
The passengers looked more like the crowd that might be on a flight headed to Barcelona that had just been called and on which we wished we were traveling. In fact we walked right past the crowd because we were so convinced it was not our gate.
The reason being that the flight to Baghdad is usually full of khaki-clad contractors, military security types all brawn and dark shades, a few coalition government types in business suits and a few random fellow members of the press. But today there were additions to the pack – groups of smartly dressed Iraqi women and families all looking in holiday mood.
The place was packed, the first flight out after days of the airport being closed after the Askariya shrine bombing last week, so we were lucky to find a few spare seats and squeezed in next to a group of chatty Iraqi women.
Not just grieving widows
One, a voluptuous lady wearing tight grey trousers with sparkly bits down the side and a bright green headscarf, started to flirt with my male colleague – gesturing that she was too fat and taking up too much room. The lady next to her, dressed in pink and sparkles from head to toe with matching pink ring and bracelet, was proudly browsing on her state-of-the-art computer, while the third lady sported a leopard-print headscarf that any fashionista would have coveted.
Who were they these animated women so full of buzz? They certainly didn't match my preconceived notion of the wailing oppressed women of the street that we see so often on our screens.
Having visited Iraq so often, I should have known better, and I really do, but well, I'd forgotten. The interest level in the role and plight of Iraqi women – besides being grieving mothers and widows – seemed to have dropped off as the al-Qaida attacks and U.S. military surge took over the news focus.
Totally frustrated that I hadn't picked up sufficient Arabic over the many years I’ve spent working in the region, I searched around to find someone to help me strike up a conversation. I didn't get far, but I did manage to make out that these ladies worked for an NGO and were returning from a conference in Istanbul. We were sitting next to them on the plane and as soon as we landed one of their spanking new cell phones rang out with the latest grooves.
How do they do it?
"I need a more up-to-date ring tone," I told my colleague, secretly wondering just how these women manage. I'd been checking them out in the waiting room questioning how they get by day by day. Their grooming and colored hair would need serious upkeep, the difficulties of keeping fit when you can't leave home and then braving the treacherous streets to snatch those fashions which they were wearing with such pizzaz? How did they do it?
But more immediately, how were they going to get home from the airport? Presumably their waiting families, with whom they were chatting so excitedly on their cells, had braved the incredibly dangerous airport road in normal vehicles to wait for them while we would be being picked up by a serious security team in an armored car.
And then there were young couples with kids; how must they be feeling about bringing their children back to a trauma ridden country? And why were they doing so? And what about sex? What effect did the day-to-day horrors and fears have on Iraqi couples sex life?
I started to recall the various Iraqi women we'd encountered over the last decade or rather in the days when it was safe to mingle. The powerful female politicians, the talented artists, the ballsy translators who'd brave the treachery of Saddam's regime to help us with our news stories, and, more recently, those we'd sought out as examples of the effect of the fall of Saddam on women. The consensus on that last question was mostly negative. But what about now?
And while I had a few moments in the limbo of the baggage carousel, before the onslaught of the news machine, I promised myself to try and rediscover the Iraqi woman of 2007 – who is she right now? That's part of my mission to myself over the next few weeks of my Baghdad assignment. Inshallah, I’ll have some stories to share here.
