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City of Widows

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This week, Dateline's Iraqi Australian correspondent Fouad Hady is confronted with the horrors of Iraq's past, as he takes us inside one of Saddam Hussein's prisons for women. The dark cells no longer hold women awaiting execution, but in a cruel irony the same haunting interiors are crammed with homeless families displaced by years of violence.
 
Fouad also explores the plight of Iraqi widows; their husbands killed by Saddam, the US invasion or the sectarian wars that followed. Reliable estimates suggest there are more than 80,000 widows in Baghdad, and as many as three quarters of a million nationwide.
 
The government is trying to help by providing these women with a small pension, but many say it is not enough.

In November 2009, City of Widows won a Walkley Award in the International Journalism category - click here to read more.


On air: 21st June 2009

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by Fouad Hady

Fouad came from Baghdad to Australia as an asylum seeker, but has returned to Iraq for a series of groundbreaking stories.

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