Kuwaiti women are angry after the military, having allowed female soldiers in combat roles, decided they need the permission of a male guardian and banned them from carrying weapons.
Women’s rights advocates have decried the policy as “one step forward, two steps back” after the Kuwaiti Ministry of Defense also decided that women in the armed forces, unlike civilians, must wear head coverings.
The moves have sparked an online backlash in Kuwait, usually regarded as one of the most open societies in the Persian Gulf.
Photo: AFP
“I don’t know why there are these restrictions to join the army,” said Ghadeer al-Khashti, a sports teacher and member of the women’s committee of the Kuwait Football Association. “We have all kinds of women working in all fields, including the police force.”
She said that her mother had helped the resistance when then-Iraqi president Saddam Hussein in 1990 invaded Kuwait and occupied it for seven months before being pushed out by a US-led international coalition.
“My mother during the Iraqi invasion used to hide weapons under her abaya and transport them to members of Kuwait’s resistance, and my father encouraged it,” al-Khashti said.
The ministry decided in October to allow women in combat roles, but then imposed the restrictions after the minister of defense was questioned by conservative lawmaker Hamdan al-Azmi.
Al-Azmi, emboldened by an Islamic religious edict, or fatwa, had said that having women in combat roles “does not fit with a woman’s nature.”
Lulwa Saleh al-Mulla, head of the Kuwaiti Women’s Cultural and Social Society, said the ministry’s restrictions are discriminatory and unconstitutional, and vowed legal action by the organization.
“We have women martyrs who defended their country of their own volition,” she said. “No one ordered them to do that, except for a love of country. We are a Muslim country, that is true, but we demand the laws not be subject to fatwas. Personal freedom is guaranteed in the constitution, on which the country’s laws are based.”
Kuwaiti women earned the right to vote in 2005 and have participated in Cabinet and the Kuwaiti National Assembly, although they are poorly represented in both.
The debate about the army’s new rules for women has taken an irrational turn, said Ibtihal al-Khatib, an English-language professor at Kuwait University.
“The army needs to integrate both women and men without discrimination,” the feminist academic said. “Danger does not differentiate between men and women, and neither does death during battle.”
Packed crowds in India celebrating their cricket team’s victory ended in a deadly stampede on Wednesday, with 11 mainly young fans crushed to death, the local state’s chief minister said. Joyous cricket fans had come out to celebrate and welcome home their heroes, Royal Challengers Bengaluru, after they beat Punjab Kings in a roller-coaster Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket final on Tuesday night. However, the euphoria of the vast crowds in the southern tech city of Bengaluru ended in disaster, with Indian Prime Minister Narendra calling it “absolutely heartrending.” Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah said most of the deceased are young, with 11 dead
By 2027, Denmark would relocate its foreign convicts to a prison in Kosovo under a 200-million-euro (US$228.6 million) agreement that has raised concerns among non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and residents, but which could serve as a model for the rest of the EU. The agreement, reached in 2022 and ratified by Kosovar lawmakers last year, provides for the reception of up to 300 foreign prisoners sentenced in Denmark. They must not have been convicted of terrorism or war crimes, or have a mental condition or terminal disease. Once their sentence is completed in Kosovan, they would be deported to their home country. In
Brazil, the world’s largest Roman Catholic country, saw its Catholic population decline further in 2022, while evangelical Christians and those with no religion continued to rise, census data released on Friday by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) showed. The census indicated that Brazil had 100.2 million Roman Catholics in 2022, accounting for 56.7 percent of the population, down from 65.1 percent or 105.4 million recorded in the 2010 census. Meanwhile, the share of evangelical Christians rose to 26.9 percent last year, up from 21.6 percent in 2010, adding 12 million followers to reach 47.4 million — the highest figure
LOST CONTACT: The mission carried payloads from Japan, the US and Taiwan’s National Central University, including a deep space radiation probe, ispace said Japanese company ispace said its uncrewed moon lander likely crashed onto the moon’s surface during its lunar touchdown attempt yesterday, marking another failure two years after its unsuccessful inaugural mission. Tokyo-based ispace had hoped to join US firms Intuitive Machines and Firefly Aerospace as companies that have accomplished commercial landings amid a global race for the moon, which includes state-run missions from China and India. A successful mission would have made ispace the first company outside the US to achieve a moon landing. Resilience, ispace’s second lunar lander, could not decelerate fast enough as it approached the moon, and the company has
RSS