I Lived In A Jihadist Camp In Afghanistan

It's Not Islam That Drives Young Europeans to Jihad, France's Top Terrorism Expert Explains read more: http://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/1.791954

Salman Abedi, the suicide bomber who killed 22 people at a Manchester pop concert this week, started life advantageously enough: to parents who had fled Gadhafi’s Libya for a new life in Britain. But actually it was that kind of dislocation that would send him off kilter two decades later, says Olivier Roy, one of France’s top experts on Islamic terrorism.
“An estimated 60 percent of those who espouse violent jihadism in Europe are second-generation Muslims who have lost their connection with their country of origin and have failed to integrate into Western societies,” Roy says.

They are subject to a “process of deculturation” that leaves them ignorant of and detached from both the European society and the one of their origins. The result, Roy argues, is a dangerous “identity vacuum” in which “violent extremism thrives.”
Born in Britain in 1994, Abedi would later be drawn to violent fundamentalism after a life in limbo. On the one hand, he tried to reconnect with Libya, where he traveled shortly before this week’s attack, while on the other, he strove to emulate the same British young people he killed.
“Unlike second generations like Abedi’s, third generations are normally better integrated in the West and don’t account for more than 15 percent of homegrown jihadis,” Roy says. “Converts, who also have an approach to Islam decontextualized from any culture, account for about 25 percent of those who fall prey to violent fundamentalism.”

With little if any understanding of religion or Islamic culture, young people like Abedi turn to terrorism out of a “suicidal instinct” and “a fascination for death,” Roy says. This key element is exemplified by the jihadi slogan first coined by Osama bin Laden: "We love death like you love life.”

“The large majority of Al-Qaida and Islamic State jihadis, including the Manchester attacker Abedi, commit suicide attacks not because it makes sense strategically from a military perspective or because it’s consistent with the Salafi creed,” Roy says. “These attacks don’t weaken the enemy significantly, and Islam condemns self-immolation as interference with God’s will. These kids seek death as an end-goal in itself.”
read more:

'What did the Prime Minister Know?' - John Pilger on terror in Britain

The War on Terror isn't making us safer.

Today’s Top 7 Myths About Islamic State

 


 By Juan Cole

The self-styled ‘Islamic State’ Group (ISIS or ISIL), the Arabic acronym for which is Daesh, is increasingly haunting the nightmares of Western journalists and security analysts.  I keep seeing some assertions about it that strike me as exaggerated or as just incorrect.

1.  It isn’t possible to determine whether Daesh a mainstream Muslim organization, since Muslim practice varies by time and place.  I disagree.  There is a center of gravity to any religion such that observers can tell when something is deviant.  Aum Shinrikyo isn’t your run of the mill Buddhism, though it probably is on the fringes of the Buddhist tradition (it released sarin gas in the Tokyo subway in 1995).  Like Aum Shinrikyo, Daesh is a fringe cult.  There is nothing in formal Islam that would authorize summarily executing 21 Christians. The Qur’an says that Christians are closest in love to the Muslims, and that if they have faith and do good works, Christians need have no fear in the afterlife.  Christians are people of the book and allowed religious freedom by Islamic law from the earliest times.  Muslims haven’t always lived up to this ideal, but Christians were a big part of most Muslim states in the Middle East (in the early Abbasid Empire the Egyptian and Iraqi Christians were the majority).  They obviously weren’t being taken out and beheaded on a regular basis.  They did gradually largely convert to Islam, but we historians don’t find good evidence that they were coerced into it.  Because they paid an extra poll tax, Christians had economic reasons to declare themselves Muslims.

We all know that Kentucky snake handlers are a Christian cult and that snake handling isn’t typical of the Christian tradition.  Why pretend that we can’t judge when modern Muslim movements depart so far from the modern mainstream as to be a cult?

2.  Daesh fighters are pious.  Some may be.  But very large numbers are just criminals who mouth pious slogans.  The volunteers from other countries often have a gang past.  They engage in drug and other smuggling and in human trafficking and delight in mass murder.  They are criminals and sociopaths.  Lots of religious cults authorize criminality.

3.  Massive numbers of fighters have gone to join Daesh since last summer.  Actually, the numbers are quite small proportionally.  British PM David Cameron ominously warned that 400 British Muslim youth had gone off to fight in Syria.  But there are like 3.7 million Muslims in the UK now!  So .000027 percent of the community volunteered.  They are often teens, some are on the lam from petty criminal charges, and many come back disillusioned.  You could get 400 people to believe almost anything.  It isn’t a significant statistic.  Most terrorism in Europe is committed by European separatist groups– only about 3% is by Muslims.  Cameron is just trying to use such rhetoric to avoid being outflanked on his right by the nationalist UKIP.  One of the most active Daesh Twitter feeds turns out to be run by an Indian worker in a grocery chain in Bangalore who lived in his parents’ basement and professed himself unable to volunteer for Syria because of his care giving chores.  Daesh is smoke and mirrors.

4.  Ibrahim Samarra’i’s ‘caliphate’ is widely taken seriously.  No, it isn’t.  It is a laughing matter in Egypt, the largest Arab country.  There are a small band of smugglers and terrorists in Sinai who declared for Samarra’i, but that kind of person used to declare for Usama Bin Laden.  It doesn’t mean anything.  Egypt, with 83 million people, is in the throes of a reaction against political Islam, in favor of nationalism.  It has become a little dangerous to wear a beard, the typical fashion of the Muslim fundamentalist.  Likewise, Tunisia voted in a secular government.

5.  Daesh holds territory in increasing numbers of countries, including Afghanistan and Pakistan.  But outside of Syria and Iraq, Daesh is just a brand, not an organization.  A handful of Taliban have switched allegiance to Daesh or have announced that they have.  It has no more than symbolic significance in Pakistan and Afghanistan.  These converts are tiny in number.  They are not significant.  And they were already radicals of some sort.  Daesh has no command and control among them.  Indeed, the self-styled ‘caliph’, Ibrahim Samarrai, was hit by a US air strike and is bed ridden in Raqqah, Syria.  I doubt he is up to command and control. The Pakistani and Afghan governments have a new agreement to roll up the radicals, and Pakistan is aerially bombing them.

Even in Syria and Iraq, Daesh holds territory only because the states have collapsed.  I remember people would do this with al-Qaeda, saying it had branches in 64 countries.  But for the most part it was 4 guys in each of those countries.  This kind of octopus imagery is taken advantage of by Daesh to make itself seem important, but we shouldn’t fall for it.

6.  Only US ground troops can defeat Daesh and the USA must commit to a third Iraq War.  The US had 150,000 troops or so in Iraq for 8 1/2 years!  But they left the country a mess.  Why in the world would anybody assume that another round of US military occupation of Iraq would work, given the disaster that was the last one?  A whole civil war was fought between Sunnis and Shiites that displaced a million people and left 3000 civilians dead a month in 2006-2007, right under the noses of US commanders.

In fact, US air power can halt Daesh expansion into Kurdistan or Baghdad.  US air power was crucial to the Kurdish defense of Kobane in northern Syria.  It helped the Peshmerga paramilitary of Iraqi Kurdistan take back Mt. Sinjar.  It helped an Iraqi army unit take back the refinery town of Beiji.  The US ought to to have to be there at all.  But if Washington has to intervene, it can contain the threat from the air.  Politicians should just stop promising to extirpate the group.  Brands can’t be destroyed, and Daesh is just a brand for the most part.

7.  Daesh is said to have 9 million subjects.  I don’t understand where this number comes from.  They have Raqqah Province in Syria, which had 800,000 people before the civil war.  But the north of Raqqah is heavily Kurdish and some 300,000 Kurds fled from there to Turkey.  Some have now come back to Kobane.  But likely at most Daesh has 500,000 subjects there.  Their other holdings in Syria are sparsely populated.  I figure Iraq’s population at about 32 million and Sunnis there at 17%, i.e. 5.5 million or so. You have to subtract the million or more Sunnis who live in Baghdad and Samarra, which Daesh does not control.  Although most of the rest Sunni Iraq has fallen to Daesh, very large numbers of Sunnis have fled from them.  Thus, of Mosul’s 2 million, 500,000 voted with their feet last summer when Daesh came in.  Given the massive numbers of refugees from Daesh territory, and given that they don’t have Baghdad, I’d be surprised if over all they have more than about 3-4 million people living under them.  And this is all likely temporary.  Plans are being made to kick them right back out of Mosul.

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The Crisis of ISIS: A Prophetic Prediction | Sermon by Hamza Yusuf

Thoughts on the Death of Osama Bin Laden by Shaykh Yasir Qadhi

Osama bin Laden is dead.

And once again, in this Manichean good-versus-evil, us-versus-them, black-versus-white, world that we are told we live in, we are expected to take ‘sides’, and either jump for jingoistic joy as we thump our chests screaming, ‘USA! USA!’, or else mourn the death of a ‘martyr’.

And once again, many people, myself included, will have to take a deep sigh and wonder whether we can ever successfully explain, to an increasingly polarized world, the complexity of our stances and the nuances of our positions.

The fact of the matter is, contrary to what both bin Laden and his one-time nemesis Bush propagated, we don’t live in a stark black-and-white world. We live in a very colorful, very multi-faceted world. Because I refuse to see everything in black-and-white, my position is neither one of sorrow nor one of elation.

It is not one of sorrow because I never viewed bin Laden as someone worthy of my reverence. He was a reactionary who lacked wisdom and who had no long-term vision. His response to Western imperialism was a visceral rage expressed in the language of a false pseudo-jihad – an understanding of ‘jihad’ that he himself invented, and not one that the trained scholars of our glorious religion shared with him. He helped formulate and propagate ideas that caused more bloodshed in Muslim lands, and more civil war, than any non-Muslim invasion in the last decade. Suicide bombers claiming allegiance to him cheerfully bombed men, women and children inbazaars in Baghdad, in shrines in Karachi, in sky-scrapers in New York, and in markets in Kabul.

Through his rhetoric of takfir, hundreds of people who were deemed ‘co-operating’ with the enemy were considered permissible to slaughter, and if a few thousand innocent bystanders needed to be killed in order to get to those handful, so be it. This was to be a permissible form of ‘collateral damage’ – one that seems to provoke only a fraction of the ire from those who harp on and on about Western collateral damage. (For the record, both are evil, and both need to be condemned; and again for the record, the ‘collateral damage’ of Muslim extremists groups is far more severe than the ‘collateral damage’ caused by Western drone attacks). His death was expected, for his own words and deeds called for action against him from a powerful military and a mighty country.

So I feel no personal grief at his death. After all, he was already largely irrelevant in the Arab and Muslim world. What good did all of his fiery rhetoric ever do for the Palestinians he claimed to have been fighting for? And what impact did he have amongst the Arab masses as they all rallied together (and continue to do so) against their brutal dictators? From the alleyways of Benghazi to the maydans of Cairo, and from the mosques of Damascus to the streets of Sana, not one protestor waved the flag of Osama or chanted slogans of al-Qaeda. It was the peoplewho brought about real change, not Osama with his anti-American rage and calls for violence.

Yet, I cannot cheer his death either. Why?

Firstly, because the intentional taking of another human life is not a cause for cheering. Even if a murderer is legitimately executed (qisas) by the State for his crimes, it is not in our religion to rejoice at such a death; therefore how much more so when the death was caused in this fashion? (By this I mean that I would have preferred a live capture and public trial – but then again, at this stage we do not know the circumstances of his death).

Secondly, those who looked up to bin Laden for inspiration were not motivated to become suicide bombers and radical terrorists because bin Laden managed to brainwash them. The grievances that all such radicals recite are political and social (I have discussed these in other articles at length). Bin Laden was but a figurehead, and his death will actually feed into the whole martyrdom mythology that these movements weave around themselves. AsJeremy F. Walton, professor of Religious Studies at NYU, wrote on his blog today,

“I do not mean to denigrate the persistent grief of the families of 9/11 victims, or, for that matter, the pain that countless Americans continue to experience when they recall or witness the indelible images of that infamous Tuesday morning. But make no mistake: last night’s celebrators, and all those whom they represent, have no comprehension of the political history, quotidian violence, and post-colonial frustration over increasing global inequities—to gesture to but a few factors—that made Osama bin Laden and his network possible. Political theorist Mahmood Mamdani, for one, has vigorously argued that a reckoning of the American role in the creation of jihadist violence during the Cold War is indispensable to understanding al-Qaeda itself. Acknowledgement of this neglected political history is even more crucial in the wake of bin Laden’s death.”

Therefore, the real question for me is not whether we should rejoice or not. The real questions are far more profound and difficult to answer.

Now that we have killed bin Laden, will his death extinguish his ideas and truly make the world a safer place?

Now that we have killed bin Laden, will the anger that millions of people around the world feel towards our foreign policy simply dissipate into thin air?

Now that we have killed bin Laden, will that justify the trillions of dollars that we have spent on our two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the hundreds of thousands of dead since 9/11?

Now that we have killed bin Laden, will our infamous ‘War on Terror’ finally come to an end, and will we discontinue drone attacks in far-away lands and draconian policies back home? (And on that note: can we finally travel with our toothpaste and without having to be sexually assaulted by TSA officials?!)

Now that we have killed bin Laden, will the hysteria being propagated by the Right and the Islamophobia that is rampant across Europe and America subside?

Now that we have killed bin Laden, will we start concentrating on far more important domestic and international issues?

I guess the bottom line is: now that we have killed bin Laden, has status quo really changed all that much?

I don’t have answers to all of these questions, but these are the questions that need to be asked before we rush to celebrate his death or, as some overzealous Muslims are doing, label him a shahid. (And on a theological note, I remind our readers that only Allah assigns Heaven and Hell to anyone, so let us not challenge this right of Allah by proclaiming anything about any individual’s fate in the Hereafter).

It took America – the most powerful and technologically advanced country on earth – a full ten years to find this one man. How great it would have been if we had managed to capture the perpetrators of 9/11 back then! But our own reactions to 9/11 created a whole list of new issues, both domestic and international, that the killing of bin Laden will not solve. And to make matters even worse, in that decade a new generation, a young generation, has come of age – a generation for whom 9/11 evokes barely a memory. For this young generation, the death of bin Laden does little to solve its own problems.

If we have learned anything from the Arab protestors across the Middle East, it is that change has to begin from within, and the best way to fight for the change that you believe in – even if that fight be against powerful regimes – is through nonviolent means. Killing your enemies doesn’t solve problems; working proactively and productively to gain the world’s sympathy when clear injustices have been committed does.

A blogger friend of mine wrote that it is as if America is playing a game of chess with a small group of radical Muslims. We are not playing this game ourselves, for we are spectators. We understand both players very well, and both have made ridiculous moves in the past that have caused many unnecessary pieces to be lost.

America has just made its latest move.

‘Check!’

source

Mainstream Media loves Muslim Bogeyman

Time Cover: Save the Afghan Women

Christian Fundamentalists rule US Army

US-made rifles inscribed with Bible codes are being used by US forces and Afghans to fight the Taliban.

The weapons come from Trijicon, a manufacturer based in Wixom, Michigan, that supplies the US military. The company's now deceased founder, Glyn Bandon, started the practice which continues today.

David Chater, Al Jazeera's correspondent in the Afghan capital Kabul, said: "It is a rallying cry for the Taliban. It gives them a propaganda tool.

"They've always tried to paint the US efforts in Afghanistan as a Christian campaign."

General David Petraeus, the chief of the US Central Command, which oversees US military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, called the inscriptions, which he said he only learnt about on Wednesday, "disturbing".

"This is a serious concern to me and the other commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan because it indeed conveys a perception that is absolutely contrary to what we have sought to do," he said at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington on Thursday.

A Nato spokesman in Afghanistan acknowledged that the inscriptions were inappropriate but said the guns would remain in use for now.

Interviewed by Al Jazeera on Thursday, Colonel Gregory Breazile, of the Nato Training Command in Afghanistan, said: "We were told about it last night and when we looked into it, we noticed it was true.

"We started to take action and notify both the ministry of defence and our chain of command and they have all taken action so that we don't purchase any more of these sights.

"We gave the Afghan military these weapons. We are very disappointed, but it's a tiny little inscription and very hard to notice and I don't think it will be an issue in the field."

Breazile said: "We would have not bought these sights had we known they had these inscriptions on them."

Trijicon said it has inscribed references to the New Testament on the metal casings of its gun sights for over two decades.

But it offered on Thursday to stop putting Biblical references on all products manufactured for the US military.

The company also said it would provide, free of charge, 100 modification kits to the Pentagon to enable the removal of the references that are already on products that are currently deployed.

In a statement, Stephen Bindon, Trijicon's president and CEO, called the decision "both prudent and appropriate" and pledged to "move as quickly as possible to provide the modification kits for deployment overseas".

Major Shawn Turner, a Pentagon spokesman, said the defence department "applauds" Trijicon's response.
"We will work to determine how best to quickly and prudently implement the remedies they have proposed," he added.

The inscriptions, which do not include actual text from the Bible, refer numerically to passages from the book.

The Advanced Combat Optical Gunsight rifle sights, used by New Zealand troops, carried references to Bible verses that appeared in raised lettering at the end of the sight stock number.

Markings included "JN8:12", a reference to John 8:12: "Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, 'I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life," according to the King James version of the Bible.

The Trijicon Reflex sight is stamped with 2COR4:6, a reference to part of the second letter of Paul to the Corinthians: "For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ," the King James version reads.

Tom Munson, Trijicon's sales director, said: "We don't publicise this. It's not something we make a big deal out of. But when asked, we say, 'Yes, it's there'."





The US Marine Corps was said by ABC News, which broke the news of the inscriptions, to have a $660m contract over multiple years with Trijicon to make 800,000 units of the product.

Trijicon has other contracts to supply the US army with the sights.

The sights are used on weapons used during the training of Afghan and Iraqi soldiers under contracts with the US army and Marine Corps.

Meanwhile, the US-based Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) has called on Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, to withdraw the equipment immediately from combat.

"Having Biblical references on military equipment violates the basic ideals and values our country was founded upon," Haris Tarin, MPAC Washington director, said in a statement.

"Worse still, it provides propaganda ammo to extremists who claim there is a 'Crusader war against Islam' by the United States."

US military forces have repeatedly stated that their missions in Afghanistan and Iraq are secular and they have a ban on proselytising.

Robert Fisk on Americans in Afghanistan

From The Independent:

"They shoot Russians," the young paratrooper told me. It was cold. We had come across his unit, the Soviet 105th Airborne Division, near Charikar, north of Kabul, and he was holding out a bandaged hand. Blood seeped through, staining the sleeve of his battledress. He was just a teenager with fair hair and blue eyes. Beside us a Soviet transport lorry, its rear section blown to pieces by a mine – yes, an "improvised explosive device", though we didn't call it that yet – lay upended in a ditch. In pain, the young man raised his hand to the mountain-tops where a Soviet helicopter was circling. Could I ever have imagined that Messers Bush and Blair would have landed us in the same sepulchre of armies almost three decades later? Or that a young black American president would do exactly what the Russians did all those years ago?

Within weeks, we would see the Soviet Army securing Kabul and the largest cities of Afghanistan, abandoning the vast areas of mountain and desert to the "terrorists", insisting that they could support a secular, uncorrupt government in the capital and give security to the people. By the spring of 1980, I was watching the Soviet military stage a "surge". Sound familiar? The Russians announced new training for the Afghan army. Sound familiar? Only 60 per cent of the force was following orders at the time. Yes, it does sound familiar.

Victor Sebestyen, who has researched a book about the fall of the Soviet empire, has written at length of those frozen days after the Russian army stormed into Afghanistan just after Christmas of 1979. He quotes General Sergei Akhromeyev, commander of the Soviet armed forces, addressing the Soviet Politburo in 1986. "There is no piece of land in Afghanistan that has not been occupied by one of our soldiers at some time or another. Nevertheless much of the territory stays in the hands of the terrorists. We control the provincial centres, but we cannot maintain political control over the territory we seize."

As Sebestyen points out, Gen Akhromeyev demanded extra troops – or the war in Afghanistan would continue "for a very, very long time". And how's this for a quotation from, say, a British or US commander in Helmand today? "Our soldiers are not to blame. They've fought incredibly bravely in adverse conditions. But to occupy towns and villages temporarily has little value in such a vast land where the insurgents can just disappear into the hills." Yes, of course, this was Gen Akhromeyev in 1986.

I watched the tragedy play out in those bleak early months of 1980. In Kandahar, the people cried "Allahu Akbar" from the rooftops and on the roads outside the city, I met the insurgents – the Taliban of their time – bombing the Soviet convoys.

North of Jalalabad, they even stopped my bus with red roses in the muzzles of their Kalashnikovs, ordering Communist students from the vehicle. I didn't care to dwell on their fate. No different, I guess, than that of pro-government Afghan students caught by the Taliban today. Outside the city, I was told that the "mujahedin" – President Ronald Reagan's favourite "freedom fighters" – had destroyed a school because it was educating girls. Too true. The headmaster and his wife – after they had been burned – were hanging from a tree.

Afghans approached us with strange stories. Political prisoners were being taken from the country and tortured inside the Soviet Union. Secret rendition. In Kandahar, a shopkeeper, an educated man in his fifties who wore both a European sweater and an Afghan turban, approached me in the street. I still have the notes of my interview.

"Every day the government says that food prices are coming down," he said. "Every day we are told that things are getting better thanks to the cooperation of the Soviet Union. But it is not true. Do you realise that the government cannot even control the roads? Fuck them. They only hold on to the cities." The "mujahedin" infested Helmand province and crossed and recrossed the Pakistani border, just as they do today. A Soviet Mig fighter-bomber even crossed the frontier in early 1980 to attack the guerrillas. The Pakistani government – and the United States, of course – condemned this as a flagrant breach of Pakistan's sovereignty. Well, tell that to the young Americans who control the unmanned Predators so often crossing the border today to attack the guerrillas.

In Moscow almost a quarter of a century later, I went to meet the former Russian occupiers of Afghanistan. Some were now addicted to drugs, others suffered from what we call stress disorder.

And on this historic day – when Barack Obama plunges ever deeper into chaos – let us remember the British retreat from Kabul and its destruction in 1842.

Blair and Bush planned war 11 months before it took place

Tony Blair made it clear to George Bush at a meeting in Texas 11 months before the Iraq invasion that he would be prepared to join the US in toppling Saddam Hussein, the inquiry into the war was told today.

The prime minister repeatedly told the US president that British policy was to back United Nations attempts to seek Iraq's disarmament, Sir David Manning, his foreign policy adviser, told the inquiry.

However, Blair was "absolutely prepared to say he was willing to contemplate regime change if [UN-backed measures] did not work", Manning said. If it proved impossible to pursue the UN route, then Blair would be "willing to use force", Manning emphasised.

Manning recalled the meeting between the two leaders at Crawford, Bush's Texas ranch, in April 2002. "I look back at Crawford as the moment that he [Blair] was saying, yes, there is a route through this that is an international, peaceful one and it is through the UN, but if it doesn't work, we will be willing to undertake regime change," Manning said.

The issue is crucial because Blair was warned at the time by Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general, and other legal advisers that going to war with regime change as the objective was unlawful and breached the UN charter.

Read complete article here

For Iraqi Widows, marriage is the only option

Haifa Ahmed Mua’alim, 32, is going to tie the knot in a couple of weeks.

She is marrying a man recommended by her sister-in-law to help feed her two orphan children of a previous marriage.

The young woman lost her husband, the love of her life, two years ago to the violence that has been plaguing her country since the 2003 US invasion.

"When he died I decided never to marry again. We had a stable and lovely relation," she recalled tearfully.

For the past two years Haifa has been struggling to feed her kids, spending every penny they once had.

But without work or help from any one, she is accepting to remarry at the advice of her deceased husband's sister.

"I’m being forced to change my mind in exchange for a better life for my sons."

Haifa only saw the future husband once and never spoke with him, insisting it's a marriage of convenience for both of them.

"My sister-in-law told me that he also lost his wife and he is a good man who carries four children in his baggage," she said.

"Maybe it is too precipitated and latter on, I might regret, however, it is better to take care of six children than see your two sons hungry and unable to go to school," Haifa reasoned.

"I’m glad to find someone willing to take care of them but being happy is another issue that I prefer to keep for my own."

The Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs estimates there are nearly two million widows and five times kids living without fathers in the country.

"Widows are a serious case in Iraq. Our ministry is trying to help but the lack of proper budget is seriously affecting our work," said a senior officer, requesting anonymity for not being allowed to speak to the press.

"More widows will be added to this group and to help them the parliament should focus on their problem, create enough conditions for them to work and feed their children."

Debate

Haifa represents a new trend in Iraq which is encouraged by religious leaders who have been advising single and widower men to marry widows as a way to help them.

"Those women are victims of the violence in our country," Sheikh Abdul-Kareem Rafel, a religious leader at Sadr City, told IOL.

"The government isn’t offering them enough help to raise their kids alone and advising Iraqis to marry them is a nice way to prevent millions of kids from being raised without a father and prevent women from becoming prostitutes to support them."

Rana Lattif, a local woman activist, opposes such second marriage arrangements.

"Instead of encouraging women to remarry, we have to force the government to help them, offer stable living conditions and open job places as the majority became widows because of the unfair war in the country," she told IOL.

"Of course there are women who prefer to be in such unacceptable situation but they are few and the majority is marrying again because it was the only choice found," she contends.

"If the government takes responsibility towards them, I’m sure this number would decrease impressively."

Sara al-Azza, a member of a charity that has nearly 1,200 widows registered with more than half willing to remarry, disagrees.

"We cannot keep waiting for the government to take an action," she told IOL.

"The women come to us after deciding to remarry and what we do is just look for men who have a good background, true good intentions and are able to support her family," she explains.

"No one is forced to marry but we have made many arrangements with the both sides happy to start a new life together.

"Since we started working on this issue, we never had a complaint from any of the parties. It is a serious matter and we are happy to help."

Rhim Abdel-Rassoul Rabia’a, a 41-yrea-old mother of three who lost her husband three years in a Baghdad bomb attack, is waiting for a second husband.

"After years of looking for a job, I got desperate and that’s why I started looking for a second marriage even though that was the last thing I would like to do," she told IOL.

"I was told that women over 40 take more time to find a husband but this is my only hope. I just want a man to look after me and my kids, even if I marry without love."

Rhim says when she was a young girl she dreamed of a life of happiness, studying and working to become someone important in life.

"I know that none of my dreams can come true but at least I can help my kids become able to support themselves without the need to remarry for that."