Five women confront a new Iraq
From actresses to lawyers, women are seizing a historic if uncertain moment
Ashtar Jassim Al-Yasari is standing in the cramped office of her newspaper, Habez Bouz, when the air conditioning suddenly cuts out. An immediate crash of heat - the product of temperatures outside soaring above 130 degrees F. - makes it harder to tolerate the jostling in the narrow room that houses editors of four papers that have sprung to life in postwar Baghdad.
Ms. Yasari, wearing a lavender head scarf that makes her khaki-green eyes even more striking, is the only woman among them.
There are other women journalists in Iraq, but postwar insecurity has forced many professional women to stay home. Yasari shrugs at the situation with an air of steely equanimity: It won't stop her, she says, though her father or brother escorts her whenever she leaves home - something she never faced before the war.
Neither will the signs warning women to dress more conservatively slow her down. "We are an Islamic country, but we can't be forced to wear things we don't like. No group has any right to tell us what to do just yet. That's why we're putting out this paper."
Three months since the toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime, Iraq is tottering between the forces of renewal and revolt.
Amid the anarchy, some women are seizing opportunities to make an impact in ways never before possible. Some are just trying to stay afloat in conditions that make life feel more difficult than it was under the Baathist regime. Still others are alarmed to find that many liberties appear to be fast disappearing under the weight of ongoing violence and the newfound muscle of Islamic fundamentalists.
For the more than half of Iraqis who are women, whether life is better now than under Mr. Hussein depends on whom one asks.
A man lectures his friend about the rampant looting in Baghdad. "It's your fault you're religious!" the man says. "I told you to steal, but you're too stubborn to listen!" Elsewhere, people praise a neighbor who has brought a generator to share among several houses without electricity. Exclaims one: "God bless him for such a good robbery!"
Such humor laced with social criticism fills the pages of one of the hippest new papers to hit Baghdad. A rarity among the flood of publications that have cropped up, "Habez Bouz" is a satirical weekly that revels in lampooning life both under Hussein and the US-led occupation.
A rarity, moreover, because its founder and editor, Ms. Yasari, is a 24-year-old woman.
The majority of Iraq's new publications tend to serve things straight up. But Yasari started her paper with a different mission: to hold a mirror up to Iraqi society and force people to snicker at its reflection. "Due to the circumstances we live in, everything around us seems ironic, and the only way we can breathe is to laugh at it," says Yasari.
The security problems are sometimes the focus of the more serious articles in the paper. In one piece, Yasari tells the story of a man who, not long ago, was arrested by intelligence police and imprisoned and tortured for a year and a half. He was sent home when the police realized they had mistaken him for someone with a similar name.
Yasari likes to publish such stories because in the past they were whispered about in secret, or simply went untold.
"All the newspapers after the fall reflect political subjects. But ours also reflect social problems. We write about the water problems, the gasoline lines, the looting. This wasn't allowed in the past," says Yasari.
