New dark age for Iraqi women

Here's what Howard Dean was referring to regarding Iraqi women...

From Peter Beaumont in The Observer UK:

Earlier this year I was in Iraq's second city, Basra, lunching with a group of Iraqi women professionals. It was the time of the elections, and the conversation turned to women's rights. Since the fall of Saddam, the women complained, their freedoms had gradually been eroded, not by official diktat but by groups of Shia radicals who had invaded hospitals, universities and schools, insisting that women wore headscarves and behaved as men saw fit.

It was a story I heard again and again across the once cosmopolitan city from middle-class professional women who told me they intended to vote for the secular list headed by interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi for fear of what would happen if the 'religious' Shia list swept to a majority.

It was not to be. Allawi and the largely secular views he represented have lost out to a new sense of religiosity and resurgence of tribal authority that is on the march across Iraq south of Kurdistan.