OWFI

I was very interested to learn about the Organization for Women’s Freedom in Iraq or OWFI. Since the end of Saddam’s regime this group was developed by women in order to fight for the women’s rights that had been lost due to the Gulf War and Saddam’s embrace of Islamic tribal law. The women of OWFI are very brave and fight for basic rights everyday in spite of personal death threats and the sight of women around them being abused, raped and killed. A fact that interested me was that women were not being attacked by Saddam’s regime, the government or anyone of particular power. These women who were being murdered were done so by regular citizens of the streets. “Now the violence is… being committed by everyone around you” (Fang 2007). Women with professional jobs and those attending university are often targets for death. This control over women in the last ten years has led to a frightening drop in the literacy rate from 75% to 25%. How is the education of women and their basic rights affect the men who are currently in power? Women are not asking to change the world, they simply want what is owed to them. “Often, the first salvo in a war for theocracy is a systematic attack on women and minorities who represent or demand an alternative or competing vision for society” (Fang 20007). When women and minorities are finally controlled, “less vulnerable” people are then attacked. The women of OWFI are not giving up even when the women they know are dying in the hundreds. OWFI women even work to hide abused women and sneak them out of the country in an “underground railroad type of system. This organization is very important for women today and is needed to change society.