The War on Women in Iraq
10 Feb 2026
One year on, what was presented as a legal “amendment” has revealed itself as a dismantling of women’s rights in Iraq. This article examines how the move institutionalised misogyny in law — and what it signals amid the global resurgence of authoritarian, masculinist politics.
A year ago, the Shia bloc in parliament facilitated the dismantlement of key legal protections for women‘s rights in Iraq. What was called « an amendment » lay, in practice the institutionalization of misogyny, and the entrenchment of the war against women in Iraq. This is a disastrous development given the rise of fascist masculinist forces across the world, from Iraq and back to the United States.1
The loss of a legacy, albeit limiting
A year ago, the Shia bloc in parliament orchestrated what could be described as a legislative coup, forcing the adoption of an amendment through a mock vote.2 The amendment allows for the fragmentation of the Personal Status Code in the form of a separate law based on the Jaafari jurisprudence. In August 2025, they passed this separate code, the “Shia Mudawana”.
The Personal Status Code adopted in 1959 inscribes a set of legal articles, distinct from the Civil Code, that gathers the rights and duties in matters of marriage, divorce, child custody, and inheritance. The current debates around it are often portrayed as the fight between religious forces trying to impose regressive and misogynistic “Sharia laws”, and secular forces defending women’s rights. This is simplistic and misleading. The Personal Status Code is not a secular law, it does not place “personal matters” for all citizens of all religions and sects under the authority of the Civil Code.
It is important to recall that the establishment of Personal Status Codes in Iraq, and in the region, during the postcolonial era was not in and of itself a feminist achievement, as the Code itself enshrines a patriarchal framing of the family. It rather signaled that women’s rights, their bodies, their status, and issues of gender and sexuality, are politicized and made continually negotiable by the political forces that ascribe sovereignty, rights, and status.
During the colonial era, women’s rights were tribalized by the British colonial power that further institutionalized their second class status and infantilization. It is in the ranks of the anti-colonial radical left that women’s rights were advocated for outside of such a framing. The main forces advocating for citizenship based on equality, rather than on a separate law based on gender and sect, were the leftist revolutionary forces. The most radical among them in the 1940s and 1950s demanded that “personal status” be placed under the Civil Code that grants equal rights for all citizens regardless of gender, sect, or religion.
The first Iraqi republic chose to keep those rights distinct from the Civil Code and privileged an urban framing of the code, abolishing tribal courts, but keeping family matters under religious jurisprudences. It placed Muslims under the authority of specific interpretations of Shia and Sunni jurisprudences that were at the time of its drafting, negotiated by several actors, including ulemas of both schools of jurisprudence.
At the time of its adoption, it was considered a balanced frame for two main reasons, firstly, it granted women fair rights, secondly it gathered a balance reading of jurisprudence from the two dominant schools of law, Sunni and Shia, and thus allowing for inter-sectarian unions. Very importantly, it meant that unions and marital disputes would be handled by a judge appointed by the state, rather than by religious authorities.
Furthermore, the establishment of the Personal Status Code marked the participation of women’s groups represented in 1959 by Naziha al-Dulaimi — a communist and leader of the Iraqi Women’s League and then Minister, in the negotiation of their rights. It was then considered one of the most progressive of its kind in the region.
Since its inception, at every moment of crisis, at every turn of major political events, the Personal Status Code has been subject to reforms. The authoritarian Baath regime also used it as a political tool at various historical moments.
The obsession with attacking the Personal Status Code started following the US-led invasion, with Decree 137 at the initiative of Abdel Aziz Al-Hakim, the leader of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, one of the main Shia Islamist groups brought to power by the US forces in 2003. Decree 137 was an attempt to abolish the Personal Status Code altogether and replace it with sectarian codes. While this attempt failed, it was reintroduced in the form of article 41 of the 2005 Iraqi Constitution, which inscribed the freedom for Iraqis to choose their “personal status” based on their religious and sectarian beliefs.
In many ways, article 41 of the Iraqi constitution, drafted and voted in the context of a brutal US occupation, constitutes an ‘Americanized’ version of the Iraqi political system that Shia Islamist groups in power have appropriated.
What the Iraqi Parliament adopted means a return to a legal system that goes back to the time of the monarchy and its religious, tribal, and sectarian courts, and the erasure of the legacy of the first Iraqi Republic.
The Personal Status Code stands at the intersection between state-building and nation-building in the colonial and postcolonial eras. Its very existence as a separate law, distinct from an equalitarian frame of right contradict the Iraqi constitution, and leaves women’s rights in constant state of precarity, and patriarchal control.
Institutionalizing Misogyny
The “Shia Mudawana” lowers the age of marriage to the point that it legalizes child marriages, an already widespread phenomenon in the country. It provides legal grounds for unions that do not provide any protection for women and girls, it restricts women’s rights to child custody, and their right to alimony. Men are given absolute authority in the family, and in matters of divorce and the right to polygamy. In others words it further institutionalises the regime women already live under in Iraq: one that is structurally misogynistic and masculinist.
After decades of war and militarization, violence has become the language of masculinity and the language of power. Violence against women is at record levels, and despite over a decade of advocacy by women’s rights groups to adopt a law sanctioning it, women remain entirely unprotected. There are no legal shelters for women in Iraq (outside of Kurdistan) and no legal mechanism to provide any support for victims of abuse. The political elite has done everything to dismantle whatever little and fragmented legal rights women have, and to prevent the adoption of laws that could protect them.
in Iraq, women’s employment rates are among the lowest in the world, affecting women’s autonomy and economic independence. Women and girls are subject to pressure and control at almost every stage of their life, in decisions about marriage, pregnancy, their mobility and even how they dress. In the past decades, economic sanctions, war, political violence, and militarisation deeply affected Iraqi society, impacting everyone. Iraqi women have carried the burden of sustaining life, carrying most of the care and domestic work, looking after children, the sick, the elderly, carrying the survival of an entire household through constant crisis. Instead of being rewarded for carrying the burden of entire generations on their back, women are instead subject to infantilisation, and exploitation.
Through these decades of social, economic, and political upheavals, misogynistic and masculinist ideologies have thrived through militarization and the rise to power of political forces that politicize and instrumentalize women and gender issues, and enshrine hyperpatriarchal norms and practices.
In facilitating the dismantlement of their legal rights, the Iraqi political elite is not only telling women that they are second class citizens, that men rule over their lives, their bodies, their space. They are also signaling to them that they will repress any attempt to challenge this control, and that women who try to do so will be punished with the full support of the law.
Activists who provide support for women victims of violence and trafficking such as the Organization for Women’s Freedom in Iraq are regularly attacked and threatened. Lawyers, intellectuals, and advocates who speak out, receive threats and are intimidated not only through direct violence, but also smear campaigns that undermine their reputation and affect their social, professional, and personal life.
Last year, outspoken lawyer and activist Zaynab Jawad was arrested. She was avictim of a smear campaign that used personal photos of her, and then banned from media appearances by the government. This is an illustration of the ways in which the Iraqi political establishment and the armed groups affiliated to it repress dissent and free speech. To be outspoken and a woman critiquing the political establishment is dangerous as the assassination of Reham Yacoub shows. Even in death women are denied justice as the feminicides that mobilize the public opinion such as the story of Ban Ziyad have illustrated.
Furthermore, this political elite instrumentalizes the law to systematize its repression of the opposition. In the past few years, it has passed several legislations to criminalize dissent, used anti-Western conspiracy theories and “sexual morality” panics to justify violent crackdowns on protests and dissent. The latest ones ended up with passing of an anti-LGBTQ law, and the banning the use of the word gender.
Masculine restoration in Iraq, and in the world
The Iraqi establishment is aligned to Iran, and as Iraqi activists and protesters often argue, it is carrying an Iranian government ideological agenda in Iraq,portraying themselves as part of the “resistance”, the bearers of the authentic local culture and as protectors of religion, and accusing the opposition of being “western” and “Zionist” agents. However, it is crucial to situate this regime historically and politically. It has been put in place by the US administration in 2003.
The US-led invasion had a lot in common with the time of the establishment of the modern Iraqi state during the colonial era. Like the British in the 1920s, the Americans privileged a fragmented, sectarian, and tribalized version of citizenship, setting up a political system based on communal quotas, the muhasasa system, and bringing to power the most reactionary forces.
The Shia political forces in power have used and abused a “sectarian mazlumyah” -victimhood- narrative portraying themselves as oppressed by the former Baath regime and by extension by “Sunnis”. Yet, the groups that have been pushing for this amendment since 2003 are not the political minority they were under the British-backed-monarchy of last century, or under Saddam’s regime. They are, since 2003, at the center of political power, and their hegemony is shrinking at the societal level. Their strategy is also constitutive of the Shia-Shia power competition as each group is looking to assert itself over the other.
This political elite brought by the US administration has also facilitated the dismantlement of the state and its institutions, and all mechanisms of wealth redistribution, the privatization of everything that sustains urban living from access to electricity, water, to health and education.
The October 2019 uprising -Thawra Tishreen – demanded a democratic, sovereign, strong and functioning state that treats its citizens equally, and redistributes the country’s rich resources to the poor and the marginalized. Iraqis have also expressed their rejection of a sectarian-based family law. Furthermore, the smear campaign against women’s rights activists, lawyers and intellectuals, the cover up of feminicides, all are widely contested.
As feminist scholar Deniz Kandioty wrote in the context following the uprisings in the Arab worlds3 and the region, the systematic attacks on women protesters, activists, and the politicization of debates around women and gender issues are a sign of “masculine restoration”. When “patriarchy-as-usual” is no longer “fully secure”, when people are already actively questioning the patriarchal ideologies, and when the ruling class has lost its legitimacy and is being contested in the streets, it attempts to “restore” its power and assert it through the repression of women and feminized bodies. This violence becomes a violence on the body politic itself.
This brutal strategy is a programmatic version of a classically masculinist, far-right discourse that is found in the region, and in the world. One cannot but note that the rise of fascist white supremacist masculinism in the US is but a “choc en retour” as Aimée Cesaire called it, or as Malcolm X put it “the chicken coming home to roost”. The US put in place a nepotistic, brutal, misogynistic, sectarian regime in Iraq, and it is now coming back home. Americans have a lot to learn from Iraqi feminists, activists and protesters about how to resist such a regime.
Read More
A year ago, the Shia bloc in parliament facilitated the dismantlement of key legal protections for women‘s rights in Iraq. What was called « an amendment » lay, in practice the institutionalization of misogyny, and the entrenchment of the war against women in Iraq. This is a disastrous development given the rise of fascist masculinist forces across the world, from Iraq and back to the United States.1
The loss of a legacy, albeit limiting
A year ago, the Shia bloc in parliament orchestrated what could be described as a legislative coup, forcing the adoption of an amendment through a mock vote.2 The amendment allows for the fragmentation of the Personal Status Code in the form of a separate law based on the Jaafari jurisprudence. In August 2025, they passed this separate code, the “Shia Mudawana”.
The Personal Status Code adopted in 1959 inscribes a set of legal articles, distinct from the Civil Code, that gathers the rights and duties in matters of marriage, divorce, child custody, and inheritance. The current debates around it are often portrayed as the fight between religious forces trying to impose regressive and misogynistic “Sharia laws”, and secular forces defending women’s rights. This is simplistic and misleading. The Personal Status Code is not a secular law, it does not place “personal matters” for all citizens of all religions and sects under the authority of the Civil Code.
It is important to recall that the establishment of Personal Status Codes in Iraq, and in the region, during the postcolonial era was not in and of itself a feminist achievement, as the Code itself enshrines a patriarchal framing of the family. It rather signaled that women’s rights, their bodies, their status, and issues of gender and sexuality, are politicized and made continually negotiable by the political forces that ascribe sovereignty, rights, and status.
During the colonial era, women’s rights were tribalized by the British colonial power that further institutionalized their second class status and infantilization. It is in the ranks of the anti-colonial radical left that women’s rights were advocated for outside of such a framing. The main forces advocating for citizenship based on equality, rather than on a separate law based on gender and sect, were the leftist revolutionary forces. The most radical among them in the 1940s and 1950s demanded that “personal status” be placed under the Civil Code that grants equal rights for all citizens regardless of gender, sect, or religion.
The first Iraqi republic chose to keep those rights distinct from the Civil Code and privileged an urban framing of the code, abolishing tribal courts, but keeping family matters under religious jurisprudences. It placed Muslims under the authority of specific interpretations of Shia and Sunni jurisprudences that were at the time of its drafting, negotiated by several actors, including ulemas of both schools of jurisprudence.
At the time of its adoption, it was considered a balanced frame for two main reasons, firstly, it granted women fair rights, secondly it gathered a balance reading of jurisprudence from the two dominant schools of law, Sunni and Shia, and thus allowing for inter-sectarian unions. Very importantly, it meant that unions and marital disputes would be handled by a judge appointed by the state, rather than by religious authorities.
Furthermore, the establishment of the Personal Status Code marked the participation of women’s groups represented in 1959 by Naziha al-Dulaimi — a communist and leader of the Iraqi Women’s League and then Minister, in the negotiation of their rights. It was then considered one of the most progressive of its kind in the region.
Since its inception, at every moment of crisis, at every turn of major political events, the Personal Status Code has been subject to reforms. The authoritarian Baath regime also used it as a political tool at various historical moments.
The obsession with attacking the Personal Status Code started following the US-led invasion, with Decree 137 at the initiative of Abdel Aziz Al-Hakim, the leader of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, one of the main Shia Islamist groups brought to power by the US forces in 2003. Decree 137 was an attempt to abolish the Personal Status Code altogether and replace it with sectarian codes. While this attempt failed, it was reintroduced in the form of article 41 of the 2005 Iraqi Constitution, which inscribed the freedom for Iraqis to choose their “personal status” based on their religious and sectarian beliefs.
In many ways, article 41 of the Iraqi constitution, drafted and voted in the context of a brutal US occupation, constitutes an ‘Americanized’ version of the Iraqi political system that Shia Islamist groups in power have appropriated.
What the Iraqi Parliament adopted means a return to a legal system that goes back to the time of the monarchy and its religious, tribal, and sectarian courts, and the erasure of the legacy of the first Iraqi Republic.
The Personal Status Code stands at the intersection between state-building and nation-building in the colonial and postcolonial eras. Its very existence as a separate law, distinct from an equalitarian frame of right contradict the Iraqi constitution, and leaves women’s rights in constant state of precarity, and patriarchal control.
Institutionalizing Misogyny
The “Shia Mudawana” lowers the age of marriage to the point that it legalizes child marriages, an already widespread phenomenon in the country. It provides legal grounds for unions that do not provide any protection for women and girls, it restricts women’s rights to child custody, and their right to alimony. Men are given absolute authority in the family, and in matters of divorce and the right to polygamy. In others words it further institutionalises the regime women already live under in Iraq: one that is structurally misogynistic and masculinist.
After decades of war and militarization, violence has become the language of masculinity and the language of power. Violence against women is at record levels, and despite over a decade of advocacy by women’s rights groups to adopt a law sanctioning it, women remain entirely unprotected. There are no legal shelters for women in Iraq (outside of Kurdistan) and no legal mechanism to provide any support for victims of abuse. The political elite has done everything to dismantle whatever little and fragmented legal rights women have, and to prevent the adoption of laws that could protect them.
in Iraq, women’s employment rates are among the lowest in the world, affecting women’s autonomy and economic independence. Women and girls are subject to pressure and control at almost every stage of their life, in decisions about marriage, pregnancy, their mobility and even how they dress. In the past decades, economic sanctions, war, political violence, and militarisation deeply affected Iraqi society, impacting everyone. Iraqi women have carried the burden of sustaining life, carrying most of the care and domestic work, looking after children, the sick, the elderly, carrying the survival of an entire household through constant crisis. Instead of being rewarded for carrying the burden of entire generations on their back, women are instead subject to infantilisation, and exploitation.
Through these decades of social, economic, and political upheavals, misogynistic and masculinist ideologies have thrived through militarization and the rise to power of political forces that politicize and instrumentalize women and gender issues, and enshrine hyperpatriarchal norms and practices.
In facilitating the dismantlement of their legal rights, the Iraqi political elite is not only telling women that they are second class citizens, that men rule over their lives, their bodies, their space. They are also signaling to them that they will repress any attempt to challenge this control, and that women who try to do so will be punished with the full support of the law.
Activists who provide support for women victims of violence and trafficking such as the Organization for Women’s Freedom in Iraq are regularly attacked and threatened. Lawyers, intellectuals, and advocates who speak out, receive threats and are intimidated not only through direct violence, but also smear campaigns that undermine their reputation and affect their social, professional, and personal life.
Last year, outspoken lawyer and activist Zaynab Jawad was arrested. She was avictim of a smear campaign that used personal photos of her, and then banned from media appearances by the government. This is an illustration of the ways in which the Iraqi political establishment and the armed groups affiliated to it repress dissent and free speech. To be outspoken and a woman critiquing the political establishment is dangerous as the assassination of Reham Yacoub shows. Even in death women are denied justice as the feminicides that mobilize the public opinion such as the story of Ban Ziyad have illustrated.
Furthermore, this political elite instrumentalizes the law to systematize its repression of the opposition. In the past few years, it has passed several legislations to criminalize dissent, used anti-Western conspiracy theories and “sexual morality” panics to justify violent crackdowns on protests and dissent. The latest ones ended up with passing of an anti-LGBTQ law, and the banning the use of the word gender.
Masculine restoration in Iraq, and in the world
The Iraqi establishment is aligned to Iran, and as Iraqi activists and protesters often argue, it is carrying an Iranian government ideological agenda in Iraq,portraying themselves as part of the “resistance”, the bearers of the authentic local culture and as protectors of religion, and accusing the opposition of being “western” and “Zionist” agents. However, it is crucial to situate this regime historically and politically. It has been put in place by the US administration in 2003.
The US-led invasion had a lot in common with the time of the establishment of the modern Iraqi state during the colonial era. Like the British in the 1920s, the Americans privileged a fragmented, sectarian, and tribalized version of citizenship, setting up a political system based on communal quotas, the muhasasa system, and bringing to power the most reactionary forces.
The Shia political forces in power have used and abused a “sectarian mazlumyah” -victimhood- narrative portraying themselves as oppressed by the former Baath regime and by extension by “Sunnis”. Yet, the groups that have been pushing for this amendment since 2003 are not the political minority they were under the British-backed-monarchy of last century, or under Saddam’s regime. They are, since 2003, at the center of political power, and their hegemony is shrinking at the societal level. Their strategy is also constitutive of the Shia-Shia power competition as each group is looking to assert itself over the other.
This political elite brought by the US administration has also facilitated the dismantlement of the state and its institutions, and all mechanisms of wealth redistribution, the privatization of everything that sustains urban living from access to electricity, water, to health and education.
The October 2019 uprising -Thawra Tishreen – demanded a democratic, sovereign, strong and functioning state that treats its citizens equally, and redistributes the country’s rich resources to the poor and the marginalized. Iraqis have also expressed their rejection of a sectarian-based family law. Furthermore, the smear campaign against women’s rights activists, lawyers and intellectuals, the cover up of feminicides, all are widely contested.
As feminist scholar Deniz Kandioty wrote in the context following the uprisings in the Arab worlds3 and the region, the systematic attacks on women protesters, activists, and the politicization of debates around women and gender issues are a sign of “masculine restoration”. When “patriarchy-as-usual” is no longer “fully secure”, when people are already actively questioning the patriarchal ideologies, and when the ruling class has lost its legitimacy and is being contested in the streets, it attempts to “restore” its power and assert it through the repression of women and feminized bodies. This violence becomes a violence on the body politic itself.
This brutal strategy is a programmatic version of a classically masculinist, far-right discourse that is found in the region, and in the world. One cannot but note that the rise of fascist white supremacist masculinism in the US is but a “choc en retour” as Aimée Cesaire called it, or as Malcolm X put it “the chicken coming home to roost”. The US put in place a nepotistic, brutal, misogynistic, sectarian regime in Iraq, and it is now coming back home. Americans have a lot to learn from Iraqi feminists, activists and protesters about how to resist such a regime.
