GENDER POLITICS Iraq is also a battleground for women's rights BY MARY ANN SORRENTINO

In a place like Baghdad, where the air smells of death daily, and lifeless bodies are a routine sight for residents and visitors, the loss of one more Iraqi life is in danger of being understated.

But a woman like Khadouri Sakri must not be quickly mourned, buried and forgotten. She, like the other women of Iraq — those veiled and those defying the veil — are the subtext of a war story that is too seldom read.

"The cowards finally reached her." This is what Hamdiya Ahmed, an Iraq National Assembly colleague of Sakri, who was assassinated in late April at her home in Baghdad, told the New York Times. Sakri, like Ahmed, was one of the 79 female members of the Assembly’s 275 deputies — a higher proportion of women than in the US Senate. "None of us are safe," Ahmed said.

The story of these female legislators is one of self-liberation tied to the political evolution of their country. These women who stood in line to vote, often under threat of violence from their own family members, are the unspoken heroes of a centuries-old conflict. Their story is less a military struggle than one of a social pounding away at the veneer of Islamic subordination of women, in the name of the Koran.

My cousin Adrian is the owner of a cosmetics company in Milan, Italy. He says his biggest accounts are in Arab countries, where, for the most part, veils cover women’s faces. Frivolous grounds, perhaps, but wherever women can rebel, they do. In the best-selling book Reading Lolita in Tehran, the author Azar Nafisi, a female university professor, describes the conflict of the women in her reading group. They come to her home veiled and draped in long burqas. As soon as the door closes behind them, and they are safe in her living room, they remove their heavy robes and relax in their blue jeans or Western skirts.

Hidden though Iraqi and other Muslim women may be forced to be, the fire of freedom still burns in them, as it has and does in the breasts of their sisters around the globe. Even those who love the faith of Islam, who are willing to have the men in their families lead them, somehow long for some area of their lives where their bondage might be relaxed.

Others, of course, like Sakri, have discarded the veil and with it all trappings of second-class citizenship. They bravely walk the streets of Baghdad, speak their minds, run for office, and are elected by other forward-thinking constituents.

Such women carry to the assembly the often-expressed needs and sometimes unexpressed desires of half of Iraq’s population — the half that isn’t supposed to be heard, but must be. The number of women in Iraq’s National Assembly is down by one. More silencing of those who buck tradition may follow.

Sakri’s death reminds us that beyond the lust for oil, and beyond the Iraqi fight for independence as a nation, the universal struggle of women for equal voice and equal participation will continue long after the last US soldier leaves Baghdad and the last US congressional representative goes home for summer recess.

It also reminds us that the struggle of all women for equal participation, societal respect, and equal voice may vary slightly by degrees, depending on where they live and work. What many of us know, however, is that, like Khadouri Sakri, we will probably be long dead before the equity we seek ever comes.