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<div><span style="color: #000000;"><strong><span style="text-decoration: underline;">FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE</span></strong></span></div>
<div><span style="color: #000000;">CONTACT: Kaitlyn Soligan, MADRE (212) 627-0444,</span> <a href="mailto:media@madre.org">media@madre.org</a></div>
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<div align="center"><span style="color: #000000;"><strong>MADRE and Partners in Iraq Speak Out on 10<sup>th</sup> Anniversary of Invasion</strong></span></div>
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<div><span style="color: #000000;"><em>March 19, 2013—New York, NY—</em>In an op-ed published today, MADRE Executive Director Yifat Susskind and Yanar Mohammed of the Organization for Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI) spoke jointly about the decade of occupation and its impact on women’s rights:</span></div>
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<div style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #000000;">If you talk to women in war zones anywhere, they’ll tell you that domestic violence increases in war-time. But in Iraq, violence against women has also been systematic. And unknown to most Americans, it has been orchestrated by some of the very forces that the US boosted to power.</span></div>
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<div style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #000000;">Like religious fundamentalists everywhere, these sectarian militias and clerics have a social vision for their country that depends on subjugating women. But because the US wagered that they could deliver stability, these men were cultivated as allies in Iraq. As we now know, they never even got the stability they traded women’s rights for.</span></div>
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<div style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #000000;">The dynamic was clearly at work in the drafting of Iraq’s constitution, heavily brokered by the US. To pass it, the US needed support from Islamist parties. They got it by trading away women’s rights. </span></div>
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<div><span style="color: #000000;">To read the full text of the op-ed,</span> <a href="http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/03/19-6">click here</a>.</div>
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<div><span style="color: #000000;">Ms. Susskind is available today for further comment and can be contacted through Kaitlyn Soligan of MADRE via phone or email.</span></div>
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<div><span style="color: #000000;"><em>Available for interview:</em></span></div>
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<div><span style="color: #000000;"><strong>Yifat Susskind</strong>, MADRE Executive Director, works with women’s human rights activists from Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East, creating programs to address violence against women, economic development, climate change, armed conflict and more.</span></div>
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<div><span style="color: #000000;">MADRE works in partnership with grassroots women’s groups to secure rights, resources and results for women worldwide. To learn more, please visit us at madre.org.</span></div>
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