In 2007, at the height of the Iraq War troop surge, Suaad Allami opened the country’s first all-female legal clinic in her hometown of Sadr City, one of the poorest Baghdad suburbs. Since then, in addition to serving in local and provincial government, she’s continued to provide free legal services, medical care, and vocational training […]
Zainab Al-Suwaij, a Women Waging Peace Network member, reflects on conditions in Iraq ten years after the US-led invasion of her country on MSNBC’s Up With Chris Hayes. Al-Suwaij, who fled Iraq in 1991 and later became the co-founder and executive director of the American Islamic Congress, emphasizes that poor infrastructure and growing sectarianism in […]
Lawyer and Former Minister in Iraq’s Interim Government, Mishkat Al Moumin describes how she was able to inspire other women to hold leadership positions through the use of already existing laws.
While determined to stay in her country of Iraq through two wars, Hanaa Edwar chose to start an organization that worked to place a fully representative democracy during and after the transition of power. She describes how this is the only way for a government to “grow up.”
Thrust into a male-dominated job with a great amount of power, Nesreen Berwari, took a year off to learn how better to serve the people of Iraq at Harvard’s Kennedy School. She was able to take what she learned to succeed in her work through the connections she made in her studies.
This article, co-authored by Swanee Hunt and Cristina Posa, was originally published by Foreign Policy. It was August 2003 in the Iraqi city of Najaf — long before the holy city’s takeover by Muslim cleric Moktada al-Sadr — and U.S. Marine Lt. Col. Christopher Conlin faced a dilemma. Arriving at a swearing-in ceremony for Nidal […]
This article was originally published by Huffington Post. Although the importance of women in national security is impossible to quantify, anecdotes like Team Lioness suggest that perhaps women bring an additional perspective to a situation — one that sees the extra value in social networks and relationships, one that empathizes with the human need to […]
This article was originally published by United Press International. As the results of Iraq’s parliamentary elections began to trickle in, one Washington based group of Iraqi expatriates were more concerned with gender, than with party or ethnic affiliation. “We want the recognition of women to be leaders, to be in the ‘making decisions’ positions,” said […]
This article, co-authored by Swanee Hunt and Isobel Coleman, was originally published by International Herald Tribune. Before the recent elections, leading Iraqi politicians did their best to assuage concerns of their more secular compatriots by promising moderation and inclusion. But election rhetoric is not reality. An important test will be how these leaders address women’s […]
The Wilson Center and Inclusive Security, along with the World Bank and the American Bar Association, hosted 20 women in Washington, DC for the conference “Building a New Iraq: Women’s Role in Reconstruction.” The results of their visit, summarized in this report, include a series of findings and conclusions to ensure that women play a […]
