Gideon Levy, an Israeli journalist for Haaretz who often covers Israeli army human rights violations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, said the Captain R episode wasn't a surprise.

"First of all, we should realise that justice and the occupation can't coexist. They are an oxymoron. When one exists, the other disappears.
 
"Second, it is amply clear that nobody in the army or in government is bothering to find out the culprit or the truth regarding what happened," Levy told Aljazeera.net.
 
Since the trial, Captain R has been promoted to the rank of major and is serving as an operation officer in the Givati Infantry Brigade's Shaked battalion, Haaretz reported.
 
The Israeli army declined to comment on the case.

Aljazeera

Maze of checkpoints separates sisters

By N.C. Aizenman
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, March 25, 2006; A01

SAN SALVADOR -- The convoy of Salvadoran troops was rumbling along a highway in southern Iraq when a bomb exploded under the first Humvee, slicing the driver's neck with shrapnel. As a medic scrambled to reach him, insurgents hiding nearby unleashed a torrent of small-arms fire.

It was the soldiers' first taste of combat in Iraq. But for those who had fought in El Salvador's fierce civil war as teenagers two decades earlier, the skirmish near Diwaniyah last September felt uncomfortably familiar.

Once again, they were crouching for cover against the deafening rat-a-tat-tat of AK-47 assault rifles. Once again, they were firing back with weapons and ammunition supplied by the U.S. government.

"Suddenly all these memories of the civil war came back to me," recalled Gustavo, a 35-year-old sergeant who returned to his village in northern El Salvador last month. Like other soldiers interviewed, he asked that his full name not be published because he was not authorized to speak publicly. "It was strange," he said. "I started remembering all these ambushes and battles I hadn't thought about in so long."

The Salvadoran government's willingness to keep sending troops to Iraq -- after three other Latin American countries pulled out their forces -- underscores the unusually strong political and economic bonds, as well as the unique military relationship, forged in the past two decades between this tiny country and the United States. More than 1 million Salvadorans now live in the United States, including 125,000 in the Washington region, census figures show. The Salvadoran Embassy estimates the number in the region at 500,000.

The Salvadoran and U.S. militaries have largely reversed their roles in the two conflicts. In El Salvador, Salvadoran soldiers did nearly all the fighting against leftist guerrillas, while dozens of U.S. military advisers trained, armed and often secretly directed them as part of a broader policy to prevent any more Central American nations from succumbing to the leftist revolution that swept Nicaragua in 1979.

In Iraq, the roughly 380 Salvadoran troops are a tiny presence compared with the 133,000 U.S. troops there. Perhaps their greatest contribution is to help preserve the diminishing "coalition of the willing" that President Bush assembled in 2003. Honduras, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic originally sent troops but have since withdrawn.

One reason El Salvador has agreed to stay, according to analysts, is that its three most recent elected presidents have been members of the rightist ARENA party, which has close ties with the Bush administration and shares its commitment to a proposed regional free-trade agreement.

Salvadoran workers in the United States send home $2.8 billion annually, and the current Salvadoran president, Elias Antonio Saca, has been lobbying the U.S. government to liberalize immigration laws so more can enter legally. He has also requested repeated extensions of the temporary legal status that the United States granted to more than 220,000 illegal Salvadoran immigrants in 2001 after earthquakes devastated El Salvador.

Last month, the Bush administration announced the latest extension of the controversial program, two weeks after Saca agreed to send a sixth contingent of troops to Iraq. So far, more than 2,300 Salvadorans have served there, and two have been killed.

"ARENA has evolved considerably, but the continuity is still there," noted Peter Hakim, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based research group. Although neither government has acknowledged a link to El Salvador's Iraq policy, "it certainly doesn't hurt," he observed.

Some Salvadorans feel it is unfair to send the troops to Iraq. One is Herminia Ramos, whose son Natividad died there in 2004.

"Yes, they have a duty to serve. But it's a duty to protect their own country, not to take care of a country so far away that has nothing to do with us," Ramos, 47, said bitterly on a recent morning as she shelled peas in the dirt yard of her village home. "It's like our government is selling these soldiers to the United States."

Ramos said Natividad dropped out of school at age 15 to join the army after his father died. Ramos, an illiterate laundress, needed money to raise her three younger children, and the army paid about $240 a month.

Within two years, Natividad was deployed to Iraq. He was killed in the city of Najaf on April 4, 2004, when supporters of the Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr stormed a barracks defended by Salvadoran and Spanish troops. A second Salvadoran soldier died in a vehicle accident.

Ramos said she knew her son was dead the moment she saw a delegation of soldiers coming up the path to her mud-brick hut. "I had this horrible feeling in my stomach," she recalled, tears rolling down her cheeks. "All I felt was pain."

Her grief soon turned to anger. It took months of nagging to get the military to build the small cement house it had promised her, and Natividad's $7,000 government life insurance payment soon ran out.

Last summer, with help from another son, Ramos wrote to President Saca, begging him not to send any more soldiers to Iraq. But there have been only small, scattered antiwar demonstrations in El Salvador, and several recently returned soldiers said they did not resent being deployed.

"Maybe going doesn't benefit me personally. But I know it's good for the country and for all those Salvadorans in the United States," Gustavo said.

Other soldiers said that when they passed through John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York on their way to Iraq, Salvadoran janitors thanked them, saying their military service was creating more respect for Salvadoran immigrants.

Many also said they felt a personal duty to repay U.S. soldiers for serving alongside them during the civil war.

The U.S. involvement in that conflict remains controversial because U.S. officials overlooked or played down atrocities committed by the Salvadoran military against civilians. But many Salvadorans who were drafted as teenagers to fight guerrillas viewed the U.S. money and training as a lifesaver for their country.

In Iraq, the warm relations have continued. Salvadorans said many U.S. soldiers, particularly those who spoke some Spanish, would seek them out in mess halls or stop by their barracks to say hello.

"They'd call us 'brother' and ask for our Salvadoran flag patches to put on their uniforms," recalled Cesar, 37, a sergeant who lives near the capital. In response, he said, he stuck an American flag patch on his flak vest, until his Iraqi translator warned him it would increase his chances of being shot at by insurgents.

Salvadoran soldiers have faced plenty of danger in Iraq, including the ambush at Diwaniyah. On patrols, they said, bullets would strike their Humvees; at night, their barracks were frequently attacked with mortars.

One day, Gustavo's unit was called to guard the scene of a suicide bombing in a market. Picking his way past body parts, he said, he was flooded with gruesome memories of the civil war he had tried to forget: his brother, blinded after stepping on a mine; the corpse of a female social worker, cut open and left naked in the middle of a road.

Now, three weeks after returning home, Gustavo said he still has trouble sleeping. If his wife taps him even gently, he bounds out of bed and takes cover.

"You felt like you were taunting death every time you went out," Gustavo said.

Over time, the soldiers became more reluctant to go on patrols. The decline in morale was partly fueled by rumors of corruption among the battalion's leadership, whom soldiers suspected of stealing new uniforms and boots. They were also humiliated to learn that troops from other developing nations were being paid up to seven times what they were getting.

Pablo, 37, a corporal now on leave in his cinder-block home in a slum near the capital, said he was hoping for his first raise in 10 years. If it doesn't come through, he said, he will have no choice but to try to sneak into the United States. He has four young children and mounting school expenses.

Besides, he said with a hopeful smile, "if the border police catch me, then I'll just explain to them that I'm a Salvadoran who served in Iraq. Then maybe they'll let me stay."

		A sign remembering reporters who have died or are missing outside the Reuters headquarters building in New York.
		Robert Deutsch, USA TODAY

It started as arguably the best-covered war in history: Hundreds of reporters traveled with the military as it invaded Iraq, and then hundreds more moved freely around the country as troops secured Baghdad. Today, it has become for some journalists the least-covered war.

Newspapers and other media have cut the number of reporters in the war zone. The reporters who remain in Iraq find leaving their hotels or rental houses difficult for fear of being killed or kidnapped.

To get to the news, they generally must either "embed" with U.S. or Iraqi forces, work the phones from their hotels or houses, send Iraqi staff to events or make carefully planned reporting trips protected by hired guards.

Meanwhile, high-profile critics are stepping up their complaints about the media's work. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, long critical of what he sees as overly negative reporting, told reporters this month: "From what I've seen thus far, much of the reporting in the U.S. and abroad has exaggerated the situation."

in Iraq that's hard to capture on the evening news."

"Have we undercovered the good news?" asks John Burns, Baghdad bureau chief for The New York Times. "We probably have. But there's nothing willful about it. I would enter a plea of mitigation that we are overstretched."

That puts reporters in a difficult position in terms of choosing which events to cover.

"There is an awful lot of what might be construed as bad news here," CNN international correspondent Nic Robertson said from Baghdad this week on the network's Reliable Sources program. "But it is the dominant information. It's the prevailing information."

Rumsfeld and Bush must know that "it's incredibly dangerous and that the media has a very difficult job," said Jerry Burke, executive producer of daytime programming at Fox News Channel. "We have to cover some aspect of the story so we cover what we can cover without getting our anchors and our reporters blown up."

Fox anchor Bill Hemmer is embedded with U.S. forces near Fallujah, "and I'm very concerned about him," Burke said. "He's out sleeping in the desert right now and tomorrow will be doing a very tough job."

'Significant' cutbacks

No one knows for certain how many non-Iraqi journalists remain in the country, but "the cutbacks have been significant," Burns said.

When the war began, 800 foreign reporters were embedded with coalition forces as they crossed the border from Kuwait; hundreds more journalists poured into Iraq after Baghdad fell. Today, the numbers are stunningly small.

"News conferences that two years ago would have attracted 60, 80 or 100 Western journalists now get 10, 15 or less," Burns says.

Liz Sly, a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune who travels to Baghdad for weeks at a time from the newspaper's Rome bureau, estimates "there might be 50 foreign journalists there."

USA TODAY keeps at least one reporter in Iraq, but it had as many as eight in the weeks after the war began. It also has contracted with a reporter to embed with U.S. forces and write the blog Dispatches from Iraq.

As of early last week, 31 journalists were embedded with U.S. forces, said Army Sgt. James Sherrill, a Combined Press Information Center media embed coordinator in Baghdad.

By Wathiq Khuzaie, Getty Images Franco Pagetti, a magazine photographer, was injured while covering a Jan. 19 bombing in Baghdad.

Though their numbers are down, the reporters covering the war say they're giving readers and viewers a fair picture of what's happening in Iraq. "I think we're getting 90% of the story," Washington Post reporter Jackie Spinner said last week during a panel discussion at the University of California, Berkeley.

Not all of the problems stem from dwindling numbers or growing risks. The news media are blocked from covering at least one part of the story: Few photos, for instance, have been allowed of coffins arriving at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, bearing the bodies of fallen U.S. troops.

Two lives, two courses changed by war in Iraq

BAGHDAD - Not long before the fall of Saddam Hussein, the two Iraqi men frequented some of the same intellectual circles in Baghdad.

They drank tea with friends at Shabandar Cafe, holding long discussions near the Friday book market in the heart of Old Baghdad. They attended the antique auction - where this reporter first met them - held every other Friday night in a dim but inviting shop crammed with dusty artifacts.

But three years later, their lives have been touched very differently by the US occupation, and by its soldiers. The men's trajectories have forced them to confront a wrenching decision: whether to reorient their lives in a radically changed Iraq - or to leave their homeland.

As US forces rumbled toward Baghdad, Esam Pasha al-Allawy, with his thick beard and long black hair, was gaining ground as a young artist who talked up his paintings as the auctioneer gaveled gilt chairs and old swords.

Bassim Sulaiman was an established antique dealer with an air of high learning, who chain-smoked his way through each auction, seeking out customers and friends, as well as deals for his antique shop.

Today, Mr. Allawy says he is fully experiencing the American dream - a rare enough event these days for any Iraqi. But after three years of violence in his homeland, Allawy says that the promise of freedom carried by US forces when they invaded Iraq can only be found in one place: America itself.

Allawy left the car bombs, killing, and chronic danger behind, and was invited by a Minnesota gallery to visit last spring. Earlier this year he exhibited work in New York - as part of the first east coast showing by Iraqi artists. He has spent the past six months living in New London, Conn., in a "dream" studio as an artist-in-residence at the Griffis Art Center.

"This is a great experience; the horizon is wide open here," says Allawy, in a telephone interview. "People are very nice and cooperative. Iraq is also a melting pot, with so many religions and ethnic groups. So in Iraq nobody is a foreigner, and it's the same in America."

Allawy's grant ends this month, and he will apply for asylum in the US. But the path from his tiny Baghdad apartment and studio has been difficult and dangerous.

Allawy had mixed emotions about the US arrival, and what it would mean for his beloved city. But just after the regime fell, he said it felt like "my first time in the outside world."

His first contacts with American troops were "gentle" because "we [Iraqis] were gentle with them." But he warned then that "hoping is not enough. We must act, and take [government] out of the hands of the Americans before it is too late."

An optimist by nature, the tall, barrel-chested Allawy is a former Iraqi national judo champion. He began working as a translator for US units a week after they arrived, quickly picking up the nickname "Jesus" because of his looks. His job with the 101st Airborne and later the Florida National Guard, was made easier because he was with "good units," he said at the time, which did not partake in heavy-handed raids that alienated many Iraqis.

But the close calls began to add up, as Iraqis working for Americans began to be targeted by insurgents. One fellow translator was killed. And besides working nights for US units at five dollars a day - raised later to $12 a day - Allawy also worked for Western journalists.

One incident in Najaf in August 2003 sticks with him, and has convinced him not to "try his luck again" by staying in Iraq. While working with this correspondent in the aftermath of a car bomb that killed a ranking Shiite cleric, we were first trapped in a hotel by an angry mob, and then escaped - only to have an Iraqi point toward Allawy and yell "Wahhabi!" because of his looks.

Believing that Sunni Wahhabi extremists had killed the cleric, Shiite crowds chased us down narrow alleyways. Eventual rescue by Iraqi police took more than an hour to arrange, as crowds threw stones into a courtyard where we had taken shelter. I had to wrap my arms around Allawy, and we were ringed by police with bulletproof vests, as we made our way through the irate crowd to waiting police vehicles.

"In Iraq, either you work and be in danger, or you stay at home and do nothing," says Allawy, who changed his routine every day in Baghdad, leaving and arriving home at different times, and changing his routes. "People even get killed going shopping, so you may as well work."

But Allawy's art suffered, even though he had realized one aspect of his post-Saddam dream, of painting a large mural at the Labor Ministry on an edifice that before had lionized the dictator with a 3-by-4 meter portrait.

Also tough has been the deteriorating situation in Iraq. But, he says, "It's not the Americans or the Iraqis to blame, or the soldiers and politicians - it's everyone." Having seen the US occupation from the inside, as a translator, gives Allawy pause, before voicing the knee-jerk opposition to the US presence heard from most Baghdadis today.

"The necessity of the situation makes you act a certain way; [sometimes it] forces you to be rude, and there is no time to win hearts and minds," says Allawy. Iraqis and Americans need to learn more about each other, he says, and to meet each other.

"I have more friends in the US than in Iraq," laughs Allawy. But ironically, it is Allawy's time in America that has made it more dangerous for him to return to Iraq. He has been the subject of a handful of stories on Western and Iraqi TV channels, about his art and the start of a new life.

"People in the street will recognize you, and say: 'You worked for the Americans! You were in America!' " notes Allawy, who says he is already 10 chapters into a book about his experiences. "Now the threat [in Baghdad] is more and more for me than before."

Bassim Sulaiman never calls that momentous day in April 2003 the "fall of Baghdad." Instead he calls it the "fall of Saddam," because it was then he knew that he would never again have to entice customers to the downstairs gallery of his antique shop - as he did to this correspondent just before the war - to whisper curses against the Iraqi dictator.

The regal antiquary didn't want war in his country, but he grew up taught by Jesuit Fathers, had known a number of Americans, and tasted their generosity. He wanted to give the self-described "liberators" of Iraq a chance.

"When people would speak badly about the Americans, I said: 'No, don't be so quick to judge them,' " recalls Sulaiman. "I used to give them excuses: 'They are young, they can make mistakes. They can't tell good Iraqis from bad Iraqis.' "

But Sulaiman's story of how that initial, cautious optimism turned to angry opposition to US forces in the course of three years - as high expectations fell prey to violence and even small, inadvertent humiliations - has been repeated often across Iraq.

"Before [the Americans] started messing up, I opened my arms to them," says Sulaiman. "We have a history of resistance. My grandfather fought the British, and my father fought the British. I never thought that I would fight anybody, but here we are with the Americans."

Sulaiman says he first started to see mistakes, such as the arrival of exile Iraqis slotted into positions of power; they were people who had been away so long that their accents had changed. Violence also began to take root, making it more difficult for Sulaiman to travel from his house in upmarket Mansour neighborhood to his shop elsewhere in Baghdad.

"I'm not going there every day," laments Sulaiman. "It's too far, and you never know what is in the road." He has, in fact, not visited the shop for eight months, and the two women who run it might call with big sales of $2,000 or $3,000 two days in a row, and then sell nothing for months.

While keeping a close watch over the large collection of original paintings in his home - many purchased as families left before and during the 2003 conflict - Sulaiman's first love has turned into more of a hobby. He now manages four large companies owned by a friend he has known since he was a boy.

"I did not think of leaving," scoffs Sulaiman. "I thought: 'If I leave, then who will stay? The idiots, the thieves, and the bombmakers?' "

That disdain is not just reserved for Iraqis and their ineffective politicians. Sulaiman's optimism about the Americans began to deflate with a small incident in late 2004.

He watched as a Humvee rear-ended a car in his district. "The [Iraqi] man got out - he was probably feeding seven kids - his bumper falls off, and his mouth was wide open," says Sulaiman. "The American comes out, and laughs, and says, 'Oh, sorry,' and drives off. Ever since then, I have been disturbed."

Sulaiman is also concerned with the quality of "democracy" being preached in Iraq. He met one man in the street at 10 a.m., drinking the licorice-flavored Arak liquor. When Sulaiman asked him what he was doing, the man replied: "This is democracy."

"Iraqis don't know what democracy is.... If they were serious, [Americans] would print a leaflet for kindergartens, telling them the meaning of democracy and freedom," says Sulaiman. "Most important is to explain why it doesn't interfere with religion, that you can be both democratic and religious."

But Sulaiman's concerns were soon pushed to the limit. While his family of four slept in one room in June 2005, US forces launched an overnight raid. Soldiers fast-roped from helicopters, used explosives to blast open three entrances to the house, and within seconds had their guns trained on Sulaiman.

"They made a mess of the house, a real mess. You couldn't walk because of the glass," says Sulaiman. The soldiers asked for the name of a man he did not know, and then bundled him into a Humvee for questioning. Before he left, Sulaiman told his 26-year-old epileptic son: "Don't worry, they are a bunch of cowards, and your father is a strong man."

When the US troops took off his blindfold at a facility near the airport, they scolded him: "You were talking and cursing, when guns were pointed at you."

"Yes, because I am in my country. You are not in your country," Sulaiman retorted. "I told them: 'I was raised by Americans, they were hospitable. But I have never met any like you.' "

The soldiers eventually realized their mistake, apologized, paid $500 to cover the cost of damage, and showed him a map with his house marked out in red - thanks to a false tip-off, they said, from a neighbor. A final bottle of white table wine, as a goodwill gift, was not enough to change his mind; Sulaiman's $6,000 claim has been filed with the US embassy in Amman.

"If they turned the country into something livable I would forgive them - I would love them!" exclaims Sulaiman. "But from what I see, it is worse and worse."

Child Bride

di Kevin Sites

Married at the age of four, an Afghan girl was subjected to years of beatings and torture, finally escaping to discover that within all the world's cruelty, there is also some kindness.

KABUL, Afghanistan

- Eleven-year old Gulsoma lay in a heap on the ground in front of her father-in-law. He told her that if she didn't find a missing watch by the next morning he would kill her. He almost had already.

Enraged about the missing watch, Gulsoma's father-in-law had beaten her repeatedly with a stick. She was bleeding from wounds all over her body and her right arm and right foot had been broken.

She knew at that moment that if she didn't get away, he would make good on his promise to kill her.

When I meet her at the Ministry of Women's Affairs I'm surprised that the little girl, now 12, is the same one that had endured such horrible suffering. She is wearing a red baseball cap and an orange scarf. She has beautiful brown eyes and a full and animated smile. She takes one of my hands in both of hers and greets me warmly, without any hint of shyness.

"She looks healthy," says Haroon, my friend and translator. I nod. But she looks older than her years, we both agree. In orphanages — first in Kandahar, then in Kabul — she has had a year to recover from a lifetime's worth of unimaginable imprisonment, deprivation and torture.

In one of the ministry's offices she sits in a straight-backed wooden chair and tells us the story of her life so far. She is stoic for the most part, pausing only a few times to wipe her eyes and nose with her scarf.

Her story begins in the village of Mullah Allam Akhound, near Kandahar.

"When I was three years old my father died, and after a year my mother married again, but her second husband didn't want me," says Gulsoma. "So my mother gave me away in a promise of marriage to our neighbor's oldest son, who was thirty."

"They had a ceremony in which I was placed on a horse [which is traditional in Afghanistan] and given to the man."

Because she was still a child, the marriage was not expected to be sexually consummated. But within a year, Gulsoma learned that so much else would be required of her that she would become a virtual slave in the household.

At the age of five, she was forced to take care of not only her "husband" but also his parents and all 12 of their other children as well.

Though nearly the entire family participated in the abuse, her father-in-law, she says, was the cruelest.

"My father-in-law asked me to do everything — laundry, the household chores — and the only time I was able to sleep in the house was when they had guests over," she says. "Other than that I would have to sleep outside on a piece of carpet without even any blankets. In the summer it was okay. But in the winter a neighbor would come over and give me a blanket, and sometimes some food."

When she couldn't keep up with the workload, Gulsoma says, she was beaten constantly.

Gulsoma's scars

"They beat me with electric wires," she says, "mostly on the legs. My father-in-law told his other children to do it that way so the injuries would be hidden. He said to them, 'break her bones, but don't hit her on the face.'"

There were even times when the family's abuse of Gulsoma transcended the bounds of the most wanton, sadistic cruelty, as on the occasions when they used her as a human tabletop, forcing her to lie on her stomach then cutting their food on her bare back.

Gulsoma says the family had one boy her age, named Atiqullah, who refused to take part in her torture.

"He would sneak me food sometimes and when my mother-in-law told him to find a stick to beat me, he would come back say he couldn't find one," she says. "He would try to stop the others sometimes. He would say 'she is my sister, and this is sinful.' Sometimes I think about him and wish he could be here and I wish I could have him as my brother."

One evening, Gulsoma says, when her father-in-law saw the neighbor giving her food and a blanket, he took them away and beat her mercilessly. Then, she says, he locked her in a shed for two months.

"I would be kept there all day," she says, "then at night they would let me go the bathroom and I would be fed one time each day. Most of the time it was only bread and sometimes some beans."

She says every day she was locked in the shed, she wished and prayed that her parents would come and take her away. Then she would remember that her father was dead and her mother was gone.

But Gulsoma had an inner strength even her father-in-law couldn't comprehend.

"When he came to the shed he kept asking me, 'Why don't you die? I imprisoned you, I give you less food, but still you don't die.'"

But it wasn't for lack of trying. Gulsoma said when her father-in-law finally let her out of the shed, he bound her hands behind her back and beat her unconscious. She says he revived her by pouring a tea thermos filling with scalding water over her head and her back.

"It was so painful," she says, dabbing her eyes with her scarf and sniffling for a moment. "I was crying and screaming the entire time."

Five days later, she says, her father in law gave her a vicious beating when his daughter's wristwatch went missing.

"He thought I stole it," she says, "and he beat me all over my body with his stick. He broke my arm and my foot. He said if I didn't find it by the next day, he would kill me."

* * *

Gulsoma found hope after escaping

She crawled away that night and hid under a rickshaw.  When the rickshaw driver found Gulsoma, broken and bleeding, he listened to her story and took her to the police. She was hospitalized immediately.

"The doctor at the hospital who treated me said, 'I wish I could take you to the village square and show all the people what happened to you, so no one would ever do something like this again,'" Gulsoma says.

It took her a full month to recover from her last beating. But the fear and psychological trauma may never go away.

"I was happy to have a bed and food at the hospital," she says. "But I was thinking that when I get better they will give me back to the family."

However, Gulsoma says when the police questioned the family, the father-in-law lied and tried to tell them she had epilepsy and had fallen down and hurt herself. But the neighbor who had helped Gulsoma confirmed the story of her beatings and torture.

The police arrested her father-in-law and "husband." They told her, she says, they would keep them in jail unless she asked for their release.

"Everyone was crying when they heard my story," Gulsoma says.

Gulsoma says she stayed at an orphanage in Kandahar, but was the only girl in the facility. Eventually, her story was brought to the attention of the Ministry of Women's Affairs.

The toll of torture

Gulsoma was then brought to a Kabul orphanage, where she lives today. She takes off her baseball cap and shows us a bald spot, almost like a medieval monk's tonsure, on the crown of her head where she was scalded.

She then turns her back and raises her shirt to reveal a sad map of scar tissue and keloids from cuts, bruises and the boiling water.

Haroon and I look at each other with disbelief. Her life's tragic story is etched upon her back.

Yet she continues to smile. She doesn't ask for pity. She seems more concerned about us as she reads the shock on our faces.

"I feel better now," she says. "I have friends at the orphanage. But every night I'm still afraid the family will come here and pick me up."

Gulsoma also says that when the sun goes down, she sometimes begins to shiver involuntarily — a reaction to the seven years of sleeping outdoors, sometimes in the bitter cold of the desert night.

She says she believes there are other girls like her in Kandahar, maybe elsewhere in Afghanistan, and that she wants to study human rights and one day go back to help them.

As we walk outside to take some pictures, I ask her if, after all she's been through, she thinks it will be harder to trust, to believe that there are actually good people in the world.

"No," she says, quickly.

"I didn't expect anyone would help me but God. I was really surprised that there were also nice people: the neighbor, the rickshaw driver, the police," she says. "I pray for those who helped release me."

Looking directly into the camera, she smiles as if nothing bad had ever happened to her in her entire life.

"I think that all people are good people," she says, "except for those that hurt me."

Tahara divenne padrona di se stessa solo dopo aver perso tutto. Suo marito le tagliò il naso con un paio di forbici prima di buttarla fuori di casa. Credeva lo avesse tradito con un altro uomo. Sbagliava, ma allora poco importava, la voce girava per il paese e lui era stato investito dal disonore. «Quando nasci femmina, prima appartieni a tuo padre, poi a tuo marito, tu non conti nulla», ci disse nascosta in una casa protetta in Pakistan. Le avevano ricostruito il naso, la bellezza di una volta poteva ancora essere intuita, ma il dolore e la vergogna che si aprivano nei suoi occhi erano ben più profondi delle sue cicatrici.
Cinque anni dopo non tanto lontano, a Multan, centinaia di donne sono scese in piazza per manifestare per i loro diritti. In testa al corteo, c'era Mukhtaran Mai. Era stata stuprata da una banda su commissione del consiglio tribale del paese, che voleva punire suo fratello per una relazione clandestina con una donna di un altro clan. Mukhtaran ha gli stessi grandi occhi carichi di dolore e ha scelto di mostrarli al mondo. Un mondo quello del Medio e Vicino Oriente che ancora uccide le donne se non indossano un velo (Iraq), che le manda in prigione se baciano un uomo in pubblico (Indonesia), che non le fa votare (Oman), guidare (Arabia Saudita), che le vende come mogli per pagare un debito (Afghanistan).
Schiacciate dalla tradizione, dall'inasprirsi del radicalismo religioso, dall'orrore della guerra e, soprattutto, dall'ignoranza degli uomini che spesso le vedono solo come corpi senza dignità, viene da chiedersi come facciano. A testa bassa, spesso nascosta da un velo, o da una parrucca come le ortodosse ebree, stringono i denti, ingoiano bocconi amari. Ma non stanno zitte. Usano il cicaleccio tipico delle donne, che gli uomini non sanno decodificare e li sfidano: professoresse che in Iran insegnano di nascosto i classici della letteratura occidentale, imprenditrici che in Arabia Saudita dirigono aziende, deputate che in Iraq sono entrate in Parlamento, attiviste che in Giordania sono riuscite a far abolire la legge a tutela degli uomini macchiatisi di delitti d'onore. «Ho dovuto chiedere il permesso a mio marito prima di candidarmi», ci ha detto Nana Albiye. La neoparlamentare palestinese, sposata con un tassista, ha convinto lui, e convincerà altri.
Ci sono delle eroine in quei Paesi, persone che hanno sacrificato la loro vita per un'idea: scrittrici, insegnanti, testimoni, come la fotografa ZaHara Khazemi, torturata e uccisa in Iran. Ma sono solo esempi eccellenti di una lista sempre più lunga fatta di madri che cercano di salvare le loro figlie e i loro figli da padri violenti. «Dovete essere senza paura. Non dormite più fino a che i nostri problemi saranno risolti», ha detto ieri Rajaa Al Gurg, una donna d'affari saudita al Forum delle donne che si è riunito a Dubai. Il mondo gira in modo diverso quando le donne diventano indipendenti.
Spesso negli ambienti femminili più conservatori le donne occidentali sono viste come poco di buono. Noi inorridiamo davanti alle oppressioni che sopportano e taluno vorrebbe donare loro le strategie delle nostre battaglie. Ciò però le umilia ancora di più. Vogliono essere ascoltate, capite, non chiedono l'elemosina delle nostre conquiste. Vogliono vincerla loro, la battaglia, sapendo però di non essere sole. Furono le coraggiose donne afgane, sotto il regime talebano, a fare uscire le uniche immagini di lì mostrate al mondo. Ora sono tornate a scuola, però indossano ancora il burqa. Ma a Kabul come in tante altre capitali rappresentano la speranza dei loro Paesi.