A sorrowful, shunned casualty of the war

Chivalry compelled Wafa Abd’s husband to cross the cordon line.

Qusai Hussein Saidie was driving home from work and discovered U.S. troops had blocked off his neighborhood during a search for gunmen. But he was worried about Wafa, then seven months pregnant.

“He told them, ‘My wife is afraid,’ ” she says, recalling what neighbors told her later. “He came into the neighborhood because he feared for my life and honor.”

In the home Abd shared with her husband’s family, she heard shooting, but did not suspect anything until the Americans came to her house with Saidie’s identification papers.

She started keening, startling one soldier so much that he raised his rifle to her face, she says. Then the troops tried to calm her and apologized. Maybe they had been wrong to open fire, Abd says they told her, but after all, her husband had crossed a security line.

Trammeled in sorrowful black shrouds, often bereft of financial support and social standing, widows are among the most vulnerable members of Iraq’s fraying society. Alternately pitied and shunned, widows receive only a small stipend from the government -- often as little as $25 a month.

The government has failed to protect inheritance rights, leaving the women vulnerable to traditions heavily biased toward male heirs. Their fatherless children are called orphans, stigmatizing them in a society in which intact families are paramount.

Government figures are sketchy. No one knows how many widows are wandering Iraq’s violent landscape, but everybody here seems to know several. Anecdotal evidence -- and the deaths of at least 40,000 Iraqis since the U.S.-led 2003 invasion -- suggests they are increasing.

They are mostly a hidden consequence of the war, locked away from sight by grief or by protective, and occasionally predatory, relatives. Sometimes the ghostly, veiled figures can be seen lining up at government welfare offices or standing in traffic to beg.

Shorn of inherited wealth and barred from the few available jobs by chauvinism or their lack of skills or education, many widows are dependent upon overstressed extended families struggling to find their own foothold in Iraq’s bomb-blasted economy.

Little sympathy

When the soldiers left, Abd stumbled into the street to look for Saidie. Her neighbors tried to coax her back into the house, with all-too-transparent lies that her husband was unharmed, that everything was OK, that the burning husk of metal down the street wasn’t Saidie’s car.

“After the fire was out, I could not recognize him -- his bones and flesh looked like coal,” Abd says. “They didn’t even bother to pull him out of the car.”

There was little sympathy at home, Abd says.

Although pregnant, she was beaten by her father-in-law, who also sold her gold jewelry. Her daughter, Zahra, was born two months later. When Abd’s mother gave her some money to support Zahra, her brother beat her and ransacked her room, demanding the money, Abd says.

“His strike was very strong,” she says. “I can’t hear with one ear now. Brothers have no mercy.”

Abd moved out of her in-laws’ house and now rents a mud hut for $500 a month, her dignity obliterated.

“I hear his voice all the time; it’s in my ear. Even when I am asleep he is in my dreams,” Abd says.

“I couldn’t recognize his body, so I think, maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe he will return to me.”

Not even a pittance

Abd spoke while waiting for an appointment in a lobby at the Labor and Social Affairs Ministry. She had spent weeks shuffling from one shabby government building to another, waiting in lobbies like this one, staring at moldy carpets and stained walls as she sought what she knew would be a pittance.

But even a pittance was not forthcoming. She ricocheted from clerk to clerk. Each said no in his own way: You’re in the wrong place. I can’t help you.

Shadha Naji, head of Women for Peace, an Iraqi nongovernmental organization, says activists have tried in vain to establish better benefits and protections for widows.

According to religious and civil law, a widow is supposed to inherit a share of her dead husband’s wealth and his house -- the structure, but not necessarily the land.

But Naji says that it is too easy for male relatives to disregard the law when times are so desperate and Iraq’s legal institutions so weak.

Increasingly, Naji says, families are forcing a widowed relative to marry a brother or cousin of her late husband -- a traditional requirement that has the added effect of keeping the husband’s wealth in the family.

“The male relatives are coming to the woman who has lost her husband and taking everything, even if they are old and married and living in their own houses,” Naji says. “Sometimes in rural areas, the families will try to marry her off to others to resolve debts, as if [the women] are a gift to be given away. As more people move into the cities because of the violence, we are seeing these kinds of customs in Baghdad.”

Respect for order

Bushra Hussein’s husband, Hazim Abdul Hussein, had been a proud Iraqi army officer, one of 500,000 soldiers dismissed with a sweep of a pen by U.S. officials in 2003.

The couple had three children, all younger than 10, so Hussein took a job he considered beneath him: He became a member of the Facilities Protection Service, a massive cadre of security guards for Iraq’s government ministries.

The Oil Ministry put him to work organizing gas lines in Baghdad. It was a thankless and demanding job. It can take an entire day for a driver to fill a car tank, often after waiting in three-digit heat. Tempers flare regularly.

One day in 2004, a bodyguard for the minister of youth and sports attempted to cut into a long gas line. Hussein confronted him.

Bushra Hussein says her husband told the guard, “Line up like other people; they were here before you.”

“I always told my husband that he should be more diplomatic, but because he was an army officer he had respect for order -- such things were sacred for him,” Hussein says.

The guard appeared to calm down, but then another member of his security team put a pistol in his hand. The guard walked calmly over to Hazim Abdul Hussein and shot him in the head.

At Baghdad’s neurological hospital, Bushra Hussein followed a crimson trail to a room where she found her husband, and fainted.

‘My life is dark’

That night, she dreamed of him.

“He was wearing his military uniform and holding a glass of water. He didn’t speak, but he gave me the glass to drink,” she says. “Then I gave it to him and he drank the rest. He looked at me and walked away, and I woke up and knew everything was over.”

At the trial, she says, a judge told the security guard: “I could have executed you, but because of your youth, I will give you a life sentence.”

She fears the murderer will be freed during one of Iraq’s amnesties. And she rues the fact that the man who handed the guard the gun was never charged.

The government has rejected her application for widow’s support, and she is fighting her husband’s family in court for her inheritance. “A woman without her husband is degraded,” she says.

Hussein worries about her children growing up without a father, a painful disadvantage in a country with too much violence and too few supports.

And most of all, Hussein misses her confidant, her protector, her correspondent, her friend.

“He loved the people I loved for my sake. He understood me from the look in my eyes,” she says.

“Every song I hear, I dedicate to him. Every nice word I hear, I remember him. He is with me all the time; I see him in every room of the house. Sometimes I talk to him.

“I think I am on the edge of madness. I have no taste for life anymore. Even my laughter is not from my heart. My heart is frozen. My life is dark without him.”

solomon.moore@latimes.com

A special correspondent in Mosul, Iraq, contributed to this report.