America's North Shore Journal

Education is essential for a child growing up in the world today. That is no less true in Iraq, where schools are a building block for a child’s future.

Three schools were officially re-opened here, Nov. 5, thanks to Multi-National Division Baghdad Soldiers.

In January, we spoke to a number of Iraqi women about the business opportunities that they were opening up for themselves. Here’s a similar story from Southern Iraq.

Photos: a couple of striking photos from Iraq

The Iraqi security services continue to add women, no matter what you may read in the old media. Here are a few recent pics

Lioness tells the story of a group of female Army support soldiers who were part of the first program in American history to send women into direct ground combat. Without the same training as their male counterparts but with a commitment to serve as needed, these young women fought in some of the bloodiest counterinsurgency battles of the Iraq war and returned home as part of this country’s first generation of female combat veterans. Lioness makes public, for the first time, their hidden history.

“This is a good project that is helping widows and people who need the money. I am so happy to be a part of it,” said Madiha Gumar, one of the small business owners, and a member of the Mahmudiyah Women’s Group.

One hundred women graduated from an adult literacy course at Al-Sharquia Secondary School for Girls in the Karadah security district of eastern Baghdad Dec. 4.

The graduates, their family members and other ceremony attendees gathered to celebrate what was the first of potentially many successful adult literacy classes.

Marines on a female search team and Iraqi women with the “Sisters of Fallujah” program have been working together at an entry control point here to help make the city of Fallujah a safer place.

The program was formed because females were needed to search other females. In Islamic tradition, a man touching a woman who is not his wife is considered offensive.