Women’s rights in Iraq have taken a drastic turn for the worse since the United States invaded in 2003, a visiting scholar said in a lecture Tuesday.
Nadje Al-Ali, a professor at the University of London, said she shifted her academic focus to post-invasion Iraq, particularly to counter the idea that the quality of life has improved in Iraq.
Al-Ali has written several books and papers in the last two decades about women’s rights and the U.S. invasion’s effect on those movements.
“People think that the way women are being treated is part of the culture over there or part of the religion, but women’s activists have been a part of the political movement since 1948,” she said.
Al-Ali said the restriction of women’s rights in the last decade has worsened in the southern and central regions as a response to the invasion.
“The previous U.S. administration and the British government did everything wrong after the fall of Saddam Hussein,” she said.
“Americans don’t have a positive influence on corruption,” she said.
“They’ve only contributed to corruption and, as a result, 90 percent of citizens in the southern and central regions hate American soldiers.”
The event, co-hosted by the history departments of Duke University and UNC, was one in a series of “Gender, Politics and Culture in Europe and Beyond.”
