Study Says 2.3 million Widows In Iraq

Asharq Al-Awsat published a study today about the increase of widows in Iraq saying that the number could be as high as 2.3 million women. It is widely known that there are thousands if not tens of thousands of widows in Iraq but the figure is shockingly high.
Some one million people were killed during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, most of them troops and this left many Iraqi women without husbands so did the 1991 Gulf War that drove Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. The U.S.-led invasion in 2003 and its aftermath, including car bombs, assassinations and other acts of violence, have reportedly left more than 100,000 people dead.
In addition to this there were the killings by Saddam Hussein's regime mainly in Shiite and Kurdish areas where in some areas men were separated from their families before being killed. Mass graves discovered in Iraq's Kurdistan were mainly of men who were shot with one bullet in the back of their heads.
The study conducted by an organization called Iraqiyat, or Iraqi women, said there is as much as 400,000 widows in Baghdad alone. It added that every day, some 90 to 100 women are added to the list, this is not surprising since dozens of bodies that are discovered every morning in the streets of Iraq are of men.