The shame of Iraq's pariah widows

By Mike Sergeant BBC News, Baghdad

Her husband and three brothers were killed. Her parents were already dead. Her house was burnt down. She was pregnant at the time and lost the baby.

But, in the months that followed, Nadia Hussein had to endure much more.

Now she lives at a refuge for women in the centre of Baghdad.

She spends her days cooking and feeding the pigeons. It's a place for her to escape the many dangers widows face in Iraq.

'Nephew beat me'

"After my husband died, I found work as a house keeper," she told me.

"A man and his brother tried to make advances on me. They tried to sexually assault me. I refused.

Nadia's Hussein's ordeal is an all too familiar story for Iraqi widows

"My nephew, who is an alcoholic, also used to beat me and accuse me of bad things."

Nadia said the people at the refuge are now her only family. But she still asks for their approval before doing anything or going anywhere.

Her story is not particularly unusual. Accurate figures are hard to obtain, but even before the invasion in 2003, there were hundreds of thousands of widows in Iraq.

Many lost husbands in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. At the height of the violence of recent years, up to 100 women a day were becoming widows.

Almost everywhere you go in Baghdad, you can see them begging at traffic lights and outside mosques - dressed from head to toe in black.

The women are supposed to be given just over $1 (