Sometimes in any society, there comes an event which preoccupies the mind of the nation. These eminent matters somehow make everything else seem insignificant and less newsworthy.

The presidential nomination contest, involving the candidacy of a woman and an African-American, is what seems to catch the attention of today’s society. It is inevitable that some of us are anxiously following the challenge between the first female and African-American presidential candidates. As much as it is an essential factor for the long-run struggle for women, justice and even civil rights, we tend to forget that there are others who are struggling for the most fundamental basics. Ironically, we are in many ways culpable for their conditions.

Some of them are hundreds of women in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq who have died after setting themselves on fire, as hundreds more who will probably do. “After the fall of Saddam Hussein and with the continuing violence in nearby Mosul and Diyala province, war surgery is in great demand. So too is the burns unit,” wrote BBC correspondent Crispin Thorold on Feb. 9, 2008. What he saw in Kurdistan, which is claimed to be “semi-autonomous and relatively safe,” was young women like eighteen-year-old Sana, who has been in the hospital for nine weeks. “Only the tips of her fingers and a small part of her face are visible