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MUMBAI:
In Iraq, a place where kidnappings, roadside bombs and sectarian
violence are all too prevalent, it is often the women – faced
with the burden of holding fragmented families together – who
suffer the greatest hardships. In 'Through Their Eyes', CNN's Baghdad-based
international correspondent Arwa Damon intimately profiles women
who all share very different stories of survival, heartbreak and
determination in one of the world's most dangerous places.
 Some
of these women had to use cameras provided by CNN to record the
reality of their day-to-day lives as it was too dangerous for CNN
to go, thus giving viewers a candid and raw insight into life in
a country plagued by violence and upheaval.
"In
some cases we blurred faces [in the documentary] because simply
getting caught telling their story could mean a death sentence,"
Damon says.
CNN
was the first television crew allowed in the al-Kadhimiya women's
prison since the war began nearly five years ago and came across
Samar, whose story seemed the most desperate of all the prisoners.
She's been sitting and waiting on death row for more than three
years for a crime she says she did not commit. She says she was
tortured by the police into confessing a role in the killings of
three relatives, which she says her boyfriend carried out, yet he
has never been captured.
"I'm
not like the other girls. Some girls don't want to talk to me...they
feel sad for me because of my sentence," Samar says. "I
don't sleep at all on Wednesdays. I stay up from morning through
the night because that's the day they do the executions, so I'm
always scared until the day is over."
Her
family continues to appeal the verdict, but each one has failed,
meaning that Samar will be put to death.
Working
at an Iraqi hospital, Dr. Eaman is a children's doctor, a profession
has required her to live apart from her eight-year-old son to protect
him from those who would target doctors since they are known in
Iraq "to have money." Despite this precaution, her son
was accidentally pushed into a bonfire at school, causing third
degree burns to parts of his body and debilitating him.
"I
don't know the future of my one child. How he is going to live?
How he is going to depend on himself? But this is unfortunately
our life and this is what the war has given us," Dr. Eaman
says. "Iraq is my life, my country. I am working for a better
Iraq, for a better future and this is a chance that I am not going
to escape."
Nahla,
mother of a six-year-old autistic boy and manager at a local radio
station, was forced to identify her husband's charred remains after
a car bomb exploded on a bridge he was driving across to pick up
their son from school.
"My
friends...told me ten were killed, fifteen wounded...at the Jadriya
bridge," Nahla says. "It doesn't cross your mind; you
always think that you are exempt from the numbers. You are pained
by them but you are outside of the numbers."
Since
Nahla's husband was a doctor, she thought he was at a local hospital
helping the wounded but she searched through all them all and never
found him. She was told there were unidentified bodies melted together
in the morgue at one of the hospitals, so she decided to visit it
hoping he would not be there, reassuring her he was still alive.
"You
have to decide by a gap in the teeth and pin in the knee whether
this person, who you shared your life with, is now this burnt thing
in front of you," Nahla says calmly. "I knew they were
his teeth…but I didn't want it to be him. It was a hard moment."
Several
months into the making, 'Through Their Eyes' is a dramatic and sometimes
harrowing account of the lives of eight women living in Iraq. However,
Nahla and the other women profiled in this documentary all share
the same strength and determination to carry on in their homeland,
sending a hopeful signal to the future of Iraq and the future generations
of women whose voices need to be heard.
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