Iraqi women scared to go home

Iraqi women forced from their homes by violence are afraid to return, despite improved security in the country and the tough conditions in camps, says an aid agency. "Iraqi women will resist returning home, even if conditions improve in Iraq, if there is no focus on securing their rights as women and assuring their personal security and their families' well-being," US-based Refugees International (RI) said in a recent report. Researchers working for the non-governmental agency looked at women who had been forced out of their homes in Iraq's northern Kurdish region and female refugees in Syria. It said not one woman interviewed said she intended to return.

Some of the women said they would not return because they belonged to targeted minority groups, or because they had been injured, reported the United Nations news service. Many widows said that they feared returning to homes where their husbands had been killed, and where they now had no way to survive financially. Some were worried that rising conservatism would stand in the way of their professional lives. "This tent is more comfortable than a palace in Baghdad; my family is safe here" one of the women in northern Iraq told aid workers.

More than four million people have been displaced or forced out of their homes, according to US figures. That number includes about 2.8 million people living elsewhere in Iraq in 2008 and those living as refugees mainly in neighbouring countries. Real protection guarantees coming from the government are what is needed to persuade these women to go back home say aid workers. "There are still no real guarantees offered to these women to protect their rights and their children alike," Yanar Mohammed, head of the Baghdad-based Organization of Women's Freedom NGO, Mohammed told the news service. "In these conditions, it is impossible that these women will return to the death and humiliation they have left behind."

"Militant groups are the biggest force behind anti-female violence", she said. She said that because they were not visible on the streets, that was because they are keeping a low profile, hiding behind different political forms because of the forthcoming national elections in January. Among those who have already returned home, the experience was often very different for men and women as well as for young people and older people. But most refugees and those who have fled home but still live in the country return of their own choice when they judge that the situation back home is safe enough or when conditions where they are staying become unbearable, the report said.

By Hayley Jarvis for SOS Children