Iraq under Saddam Hussein was a nasty place. There was little political freedom. Opposition figures were murdered, as were any persons deemed by the regime to belong to the opposition.
At the same time, there was security for ordinary Iraqis. It was a time when Iraqis lived side by side, when even the most devout intermarried across sectarian lines. Then the Americans and Brits came and toppled the dictator Saddam Hussein. The vacuum was filled by various forces - Al-Qaeda, Iranian Revolutionary Guards, sectarian militias and criminal gangs.
Sectarian strife is new to Iraq and has split apart families including the family featured in the following documentary entitled City of Widows, shown on the AlJazeera English documentary show Witness. Here is a short summary of the videos.
Filmmaker Rashad Radwan follows Zahra, a Shia in Iraq, as day after day, she visits police stations, hospitals and morgues in a desperate search for her kidnapped husband, and in the face of disapproval from a society where widows are still expected to be invisible.The documentary is in two parts.
Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf
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