In light of International Women's Day, the recent appointment of Baghdad's first female mayor, civil engineer Zekra Alwach, it's an opportune moment to remember the many "firsts" enjoyed by Iraqi women. 

The nation produced the first female judge, ambassador, and government minister in the Arab world. Iraqi women benefited from state subsidised childcare and education; they once formed about half the public sector workforce and 50 percent of the country's doctors.

Sadly, as the 12th anniversary of a disastrous invasion and occupation looms, there is another rather grim "first" to ponder.

'Hate crime' on cards for Iraqi woman killed in US.

Iraqi women are arguably the first to see their status go from one of the highest in the region to one of the lowest, in less than two decades. 

While most news reports on the new mayor of Baghdad were quick to point out last year's UN report that documented the illiteracy rate of a quarter of Iraqi women over age 12, and the fact that only 14 percent of women are part of the workforce, they lacked any real context.

The tragic decline in women's status did not happen in a vacuum. It was the result of 30 years of war and occupation.

After the eight-year war with Iran bankrupted the country, Saddam's invasion of Kuwait - ostensibly to force them to cough up "war debts" - resulted in the first Gulf War and 12 subsequent years of draconian UN sanctions. Not only did sanctions wipe out the middle class and cripple what had been one of the region's best public health and education systems, they also forced Iraq's women into impossible situations.

With a 3,000 percent devaluation of the dinar, mothers, many of whom like today were war widow heads of households, were forced to sell off their living room furniture to pay for basics like food and medicine. Girls were pulled out of school for early marriages or to work to help support their families. And many women, even those with PhDs, were forced into prostitution.

As the country - and its old civil code - went from secular to sectarian, churches were fire bombed for the first time ever, and life became even more of a struggle for survival.

But still, Iraqi women carried on. Women like the Christian activist Hanaa Edwar, a powerhouse who once confronted male parliamentarians during the nine-month hiatus of 2010 when politicians horse-traded and squabbled while millions of widows and orphans languished, by screaming at them and demanding they actually attend to affairs of the state.