March 9, 2006 | Read Time: 4 minutes
Zainab Salbi heads a charity that helps women in war zones around the world. But she has a special measure for judging the effectiveness
of her group’s program in Iraq: “Just surviving there is an accomplishment in itself.”
Ms. Salbi is the founder and chief executive of Women for Women International, in Washington, a group that offers money, loans, and training to women in countries such as Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Rwanda. But Ms. Salbi has a special interest in Iraq — she was born and raised there.
Women for Women set up its program in Iraq in summer 2003. Like other charities, it has had to curtail its projects and operate in the shadows as violence has surged. It pulled its American staff member out of Baghdad in fall 2004 — “she’s Arab-American, she spoke Arabic, it doesn’t matter,” says Ms. Salbi — and has in effect gone underground.
It made that decision not because of high-profile incidents such as the bombings of the United Nations and International Committee of the Red Cross buildings, Ms. Salbi says. The turning point was the growing number of assassinations of Iraqi professional women.
“I personally know so many Iraqi women who are professional, and loud-and-clear, and working who were assassinated,” she says.
One of Ms. Salbi’s friends, a pharmacist, was kidnapped, and her body was dumped 10 days later bearing a headscarf and a gunshot wound to the head. The kidnappers were sending a “Taliban-style message,” Ms. Salbi says: “Go home, we don’t want to see you in the street.”
Monthly Donations
When Women for Women first entered Iraq, it started its signature program — one that matches women with sponsors who send them letters and make monthly donations to help them care for their families and get training.
Ms. Salbi says about 600 Iraqi women participated. “I met women who were spreading perfume over the letters they were getting from American women,” she says. “It was fascinating because they were saying, I pray for ‘Mary’ every day because she’s saving my life.”
But Women for Women ended the program in 2005 after the relatives of some women started asking them if they were American spies. “There were enough cases to pay attention, to say let’s not take a risk,” Ms. Salbi says.
Now Women for Women, which maintains a staff of slightly more than 20 local employees in Iraq, operates a low-profile program in the southern part of the country to train women in job skills — and is considering whether it is safe enough to start a microcredit program to provide small loans to help women start or improve businesses.
The group’s budget for Iraq in 2006 is $583,500, with money from private donors, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the British government.
Ms. Salbi says the charity has considered leaving Iraq, but stays because its employees insist.
One man told her tearfully: “I’m doing this for our country. Every day I leave my home and go to work to help other people. This is how I’m fighting the insurgents. I’m doing the opposite of what they want me to do, which is to give up.”
Women for Women does its best to blend into the woodwork, renting homes to serve as offices. It bars staff members from telling even family members where the homes are, making phone calls from the office, or storing real names in their cellphones.
She says employees also come up with their own techniques for avoiding detection.
One woman, for example, covers her entire body when she walks through the streets. She told Ms. Salbi: “They think I’m a fundamentalist and the men look at me and think, we won.” But, she added: “I’m the one who is winning, who’s going to their homes, who’s mobilizing their wives and giving their wives jobs and teaching them about women’s rights. At the end of the day, I’m winning, and if I have to cover my face and body head-to-toe, then I’ll do it.”
‘Two Worlds’
Ms. Salbi has transformed her own life, too. When she was a child, her father was the personal pilot for Saddam Hussein — a story she tells in her new book, Between Two Worlds — Escape from Tyranny: Growing Up in the Shadow of Saddam. Her parents sent her to the United States when she was 20 for an arranged marriage, which later fell apart.
Having lived through Iraq’s war with Iran, Ms. Salbi, now 36, identifies strongly with war survivors. She founded Women for Women in 1993 after reading about rape victims during the wars in Bosnia and Croatia.
The nonprofit group has grown fast since then, aided partly by six appearances by Ms. Salbi on Oprah Winfrey’s television show. With programs in nine countries, its revenue has jumped from $2.7-million in 2002 to a projected $18-million this year.
The program in Iraq is not delivering the same volume of services as those in some other countries, Ms. Salbi says. But, she adds, “We’re keeping the momentum going and Iraqis are seeing it, and that’s the most important thing.”
