She was determined to finish the house in the town they had planned and did so with donations from

She was determined to finish the house in the town they had planned and did so with donations from friends Today it is adorned with pictures of her husband. His favourite mountain-view room remains locked.Nineteen months on, she has yet to receive any widow’s pension but considers herself lucky compared to most in Iraq. With the reintroduction, post invasion, of the Islamic tradition of passing a man’s wealth to surviving male members of his family, she could have been left penniless. She never imposed that on him but he loved her, she was so much the queen of his heart.”Unlike many of his fellow political leaders, he loathed the thought of the fortified Green Zone and his family lived modestly in Baghdad. When her husband’s working hours became too long, Mrs Ramez would take Kefah to the office so he could see his son.”Wadah was one of these courageous people who always stood up in parliament and spoke about the right things. He would come home and prepare the watermelon and cheese, talk to her in Kurdish not Arab. He was a rare man,” explained a friend, Shatha Besarani.When Saddam Hussein was deposed, the family returned to the capital so he could restart his political career, becoming a member in the new parliament.”I said to her, ‘Are you not afraid for your life; for your child’s life?’ But she said: ‘If my husband would be in danger I would like to be with him.’ She is a brave woman,” said Dr Besarani.”And he was a rare man in Iraq He treated her like an equal.

They married and had a son.”She liked the fact he was so open-minded, courageous, a down-to-earth man – a simple leader. She was immediately impressed by the fact this Shia Arab from Karbala, spoke fluent Kurdish, and understood and respected the culture. “While we do not want to discredit the Loomba Trust organising the concert, we hope to make the point that Iraqis and the British public hold Cherie Blair’s husband responsible for the creation of thousands of Iraqi widows,” said the organiser Houzan Mahmoud.With exact figures for the number of Iraqi casualties still mired in confusion, Mrs Ramez is just one of tens of thousands of widows created by the current conflict in a country which had already lost many husbands and fathers in previous wars.She was a teacher in her Kurdish homeland when the man who would become her husband – an engineer who had taken up the political fight against Saddam Hussein’s regime – fled Baghdad and moved to Shaklawa. The family believes Baathist insurgents were responsible but, like so many murders in Iraq today, the killers have never been found.Yesterday afternoon a group of Iraqi women held a silent vigil to mark International Widow’s Day on the steps of St Martin in the Fields at Trafalgar Square in London.The protest is designed to highlight the plight of countless widows in Iraq and demand an end to violence by the occupying forces and sectarian insurgents, as well as to win public financial support for women and children left without income.Their protest will coincide with an International Widow’s Day Conference hosted by the Loomba Trust – a charity that works to educate children of poor widows in India – and opened by its president, Cherie Blair.It will be followed by a Bollywood concert in Trafalgar Square. Clad in black and leading a now isolated life, she has at times been so despondent she contemplated killing herself along with her seven-year-old son, Kefah.She is still not entirely sure what the motive was behind her husband’s death.

He said he didn’t believe “anything they say about” his son’s alleged involvement in a terrorist plot.. When Wadah Abid al-Emear feared his meeting would overrun, he asked his wife to go ahead of him to prepare for Eid. The couple planned to leave Baghdad and head back to her Kurdish home town of Shaklawa for the celebrations. Hours later, as he followed behind, Mr Emear, 42, was dragged from his car by insurgents, tortured, mutilated and murdered – his body left at the roadside.
Today Dunea Ramez, 31, sits alone in what was her husband’s favourite room of the house he designed himself. The windows are enlarged to give the best view of the mountains he adored. In Chicago, for workers at the Sears building, it was business as usual, while relatives of those arrested were incredulous that the men could be involved in such an enterprise.”This boy he’s not a violent boy, he never got into trouble,” said Joseph Phanor, the father of Stanley Gerant Phanor, one of the accused.

“They operate under the radar screen, often it starts with individuals who are frustrated and dissatisfied.” It was unclear last night just how serious the threat was. A delegation of five MEPs returned from the Turkmen capital, Ashgabat, yesterday following a fact-finding mission to see if the EU could breath life into a trade agreement with Turkmenistan and tap into the country’s huge gas reserves.
Until recently Brussels has resisted an interim agreement with President Saparmurat Niyazov’s police state amid concerns over its dismal human rights record but in March this year the EU’s foreign and trade committee voted to consider trade talks with Turkmenistan.Martin Callanan, one of the five MEPs on the fact-finding mission, yesterday accused the EU of ignoring human rights abuses for commercial benefit.”The EU is being completely hypocritical,” he said. “We isolate a country like Belarus, which isn’t half as repressive as Turkmenistan but the sad reality is that Belarus doesn’t have lots of gas and oil reserves.”In the past week, Turkmen security forces have arrested three human rights activists and four of their relatives in what campaigners say is one of the worst crackdowns on civil society since November 2002, when Mr Niyazov accused dozens of Turkmen of involvement in an assassination plot. They had stockpiled three times more explosive than was used in the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people in April 1995, the deadliest incident yet of homegrown terrorismin the US.”These extremists are self-recruited, self-trained and self-executing,” Robert Mueller, the FBI’s director, said in a speech in Cleveland.