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This article does not attempt to be a 'women's chapter', discussing the complex social, legal, economic, cultural and political situation of Iraqi women. Rather, it focuses on women in the political field. The fall of the regime in 2003 paved the way for a radical restructuring of the political landscape in Iraq. Women were and are part of this process. As activists in parties, coalitions and women's groups, they support nationalist, religious and class-struggle agendas, on the one hand, and those of gender equality, on the other. Occasionally they combine both dimensions. This article outlines female political action, drawing attention to key issues as discussed in particular by secularist feminists. In so doing it refers to both old and new obstacles in the struggle against gender-based injustice.Much current research in Middle Eastern studies on women in conflict, war and post-conflict society is inspired by feminist scholars like Deniz Kandiyoti and Cynthia Cockburn. 1 Most attention is given to the case of the Palestinians and Israelis; only a few researchers are working on Iraq, 2 and they tend to discuss the role(s) of women with regard to transition and conflict resolution. 3 However, women do not only cooperate in pursuit of collective aims. Like men, they perform acts of competition in order to improve their individual position and status in a particular group or society at large. This is-as Pierre Bourdieu 1 Deniz Kandiyoti, ed., Women, Islam and the state (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991). For women without a nationstate, see Shahrzad Mojab, ed., Women of a non-state nation: the Kurds (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda, 2001); Deniz Kandiyoti, 'Between the hammer and the anvil: post-conflict reconstruction, Islam and women's rights',

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In 1988 the Iraqi regime launched the Anfal campaigns against the Kurdish peshmerga and their civil supporters in the rural areas. This article investigates narrations about Anfal constructed by peshmerga ten years after the events. It compares the memoirs of a leading commander published in Kurdistan with the biographical interview of a lower-ranking peshmerga conducted by myself for “Western” academic purpose. In so doing, the article highlights differences in dealing with the experience of defeat and harmed masculinity, which result from the situatedness of memory production. Left a vague topic in the 1990s, Anfal has become broadly discussed since the destruction of the former regime in 2003. By means of scientific concepts, academics and non-academics, among them former peshmerga, explain Anfal as an inescapable genocide that aimed to destroy the Kurds, suggesting that there is no need to remember defeat and harmed masculinity.

OFFICIAL MEDIA of the leading parties and of the Regional Government of Kurdistan in Iraq describe the cities of Erbil, Dohuk, and Sulaimaniya 1 as sites of economic growth and prosperity in order to legitimate its authority and to invite foreign capital. This policy includes academic representations, forms of "othering", and the use of the international public as a witness to the success. 2 A glance at the official organ of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) can be revealing! On 12 May 2009, for example, Kurdistan-î Nwê presented the headline "World Bank Describes Kurdistan as Development Star in Iraqi Sky. 93% Development in Kurdistan Region". 3 Follows an article based on information from the Sulaimaniya Statistics Directorate, a panorama picture of Sulaimaniya showing new bridges, multi-storey housing complexes and business buildings, and a diagram of Iraq's governorates comparing the economic wealth of Kurdistan to the poverty in other areas-those of "the failed Arabs", as the article suggests. What this article conceals, however, are figures available at the Statistics Directorate that indicate a sharp discrepancy in Kurdistan itself between people in the city and people in the villages. 4 This discrepancy is likewise evident in data provided by the United Nations World Food Programme (UNWFP) in cooperation with Iraqi and Kurdish ministries in 2008. Here, Sulaimaniya city is labelled "better off", whereas certain districts in the governorate of Sulaimaniya are considered "extremely vulnerable" in terms of food security, which is measured by rates of employment, education, income and buying power, expenditure, household assets, access to productive assets, water, and electricity. 5