Many people feel it is due to the ongoing terror wrought in this land that brings so much oppression to women. Prior to the arrival of forces in Iraq in 1991, Iraqi women were free to wear whatever they liked and go wherever the chose.[9]:105-107 The Iraqi constitution of 1970 gave women equality and liberty in the Muslim world, but since the invasion, womens rights have fallen to the lowest in Iraqi history.[9]:105-107
Since the invasion in 2003 "Iraqi women have been brutally attacked, kidnapped and intimidated from participating in the Iraqi society".[10] Another attack on women's rights was done by Yanar Mohammed, an Iraqi feminist who "asserts unequivocally that war and occupation have cost Iraqi women their legal standing and their everyday freedom of dress and movement".[11] She continues by arguing that "The first losers in all these were women".[11]
Arising from their fear of being raped and harassed, women have to wear not only the veil, but must also to wear the black dress in order not to attract attention. In an online edition of Guardian, the reporter Mark Lattiner reports that despite promises and hopes given to the Iraqi population that their lives were going to change, Iraqi women's lives "have become immeasurably worse, with rapes, burnings and murders [now] as a daily occurrence."[12]
