In the past five years, surveys have found a staggering rise in domestic abuse and a precipitous drop in the number of girls in school.
Though there are no reliable estimates, the country's Minister For Women says that there could be as many as two million widows in Iraq, which would mean they make up 8 per cent of the population. Some believe the number of widows is even higher, perhaps three million. A recent study of women found that 10.7 per cent of women surveyed were widowed.
The staggering figures are a testament to the horror that has been Iraq's recent history: 24 years of Saddam Hussein's rule, wars and harsh United Nations sanctions; then the U.S. invasion in 2003 and the hurricane of violence it inspired.
"We don't really know how many widows we have in Iraq. There are no statistics about women," said Salma Jabou, an aid worker and an adviser to President Jalal Talabani on women's affairs. "We do know that these widows don't have any income, they don't have a place to live in, that they don't have gas or electricity. They have no education, maybe only primary school."
One year after the United States invaded Iraq, U.S. President George W. Bush claimed that "the advance of freedom in the Middle East has given new rights and new hopes to women." In fact, the precise opposite has occurred in Iraq.
Mr. Hussein's Iraq, for all its flaws, was a staunchly secular society and women and men were equal before the law. Five years after the U.S. invasion, women have become a persecuted majority.
Surveys conducted by the Washington-based Women for Women International found a staggering rise in domestic abuse during the past five years, as well as a precipitous drop in the number of girls being enrolled in school.
United Nations figures suggest that the number of illiterate women has jumped from just 2 per cent in the 1970s and 1980s to 27 per cent today.
Many women have hit rock bottom. Tens of thousands have been forced into sex work, including many from the vulnerable Iraqi refugee community spread across the Middle East. In recent months, there's even been a disturbing rise in the number of women suicide bombers inside Iraq.
Because of the violence on the streets, many women in Baghdad say they only leave their homes when it's absolutely necessary, leaving even the shopping to their sons, brothers and husbands.
On the occasions they do go outside, most women - even those who aren't Muslims - wear a head scarf and form-concealing Islamic dress to avoid drawing the attention of the militias, Sunni and Shia, that impose a harsh form of sharia law in many Baghdad neighbourhoods.
"We've experienced such tragedies, such sadness. We can't go out on the street at all. We can't participate. We get threatened," said Hazar al-Bayati, an 18-year-old music student who has lived all her life on Baghdad's Haifa Street - perhaps the most dangerous stretch in the world for most of the past five years as Sunni and Shia militias battled for control of the street.
Ms. al-Bayati was among several hundred women who gathered at a Baghdad hotel to mark International Women's Day on March 8.
Five years after they were supposed to have been liberated, the women rallied under the plaintive banner "Stop neglecting women. Stop killing women. Stop creating widows."
The Women's Day gathering was considered such a target that the Iraqi police stationed a truck mounted with a heavy machine gun at the hotel entrance. Anyone entering was subjected to three separate physical searches.
In assessing the past five years, Ms. Othman, Minister for the Environement and Acting Minister for Women, is careful to first list what has gone right.
Iraq's new constitution is remarkable for the Muslim world in that it requires 25 per cent of seats in parliament be allocated to women, with a similar quota of positions in the senior bureaucracy also reserved for women.
Though the quotas often go unfilled, Ms. Othman said, their existence has helped ensure women are in positions of power.
But the ills, she says, easily outweigh those gains. The chaos in Iraq has allowed groups such as al-Qaeda in Iraq to terrorize women who don't follow their harsh interpretation of Islam.
In some cases, Ms. Othman believes the government has been part of the problem: a clause in Iraq's new constitution allows different family and divorce laws for each religious sect, something that has effectively made sharia - which allows the man to unilaterally divorce the woman, but not vice versa - the governing principle in many parts of Iraq.
Her efforts to have that clause in the constitution reopened have hit a firm wall: the conservative beliefs of her fellow cabinet ministers, including Prime Minister al-Maliki.
Source: PUSH Journal, 18 March 2008