life in journalism: in honour of a brave iraqi journalist

Journalists who cover politics, strife-torn regions and other sensitive 'beats' are at times subject to threats to their lives by those whose dark deeds they throw a torchlight on.

I dedicate this post in the honour of Sahar Hussein al-Haideri, an Iraqi journalist, who was murdered by Iraqi extremist forces (who are not genuine resistance forces to the American-British occupation of Iraq) last month on June 7 outside her house in Mosul, Iraq.

Sahar had written extensively on the plight of Iraqis--particularly Iraqi women--post 2003 US-invasion&occupation. One such distressing story highlighted how a few sick Iraqi men were sexually abusing women of helpless Iraqi families whose lives were uprooted due to the chaos emanating from the US-UK's illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq from March 2003 onwards.

What I have to say here is that forced prostitution or sexual exploitation in various other forms of women happen all over the world under the very noses of supposedly-democratic governments who show very very little inclination to bring sexual offenders to justice (the law itself is biased against helpless women by making 'prostituting' a crime and not 'visiting a prostitute'...i tell you if the men who encourage the existence of heavily-exploited prostitution through their visits to prostitutes are put behind bars for even just a month it will act as a very good deterence against their future visits and the financial motivation of pimps to trick and force women into prostitution will come down substantially as not many men customers will want to risk being jailed).

However, in Iraq, such crimes against women are at least 10 times more heinous because the helplessness and vulnerability of women and common Iraqi families have been brought upon due to the US-UK governments who criminally invaded--and are occupying--Iraq for no legally-valid reasons. Saddam Hussein was a threat to his own countrymen and women and not to US or UK (no weapons of mass destruction were ever found in Iraq) and I have no doubt in my mind that the people of Iraq would have managed to uproot Hussein sooner or later (and even if they would have required external assistance it would have not involved its country's oil resources and military control being in the hands of non-Iraqis).

I salute the soul of Sahar and end this post with an obituary on her by Guardian.