BAGHDAD, July 7 — Under Saddam Hussein, Iraq was a mostly secular society. From my conversations with Iraqis and U.S. Embassy workers, it seems evident that Saddam didn’t care about religion so much as total subservience and perfection. If you lived in some manner that disagreed with him enoughnot only would he kill you and your immediate family, but he’d kill your next seven closest relations and their immediate families. Sunni, Christian, Shia, Kurd—religion and sect didn’t matter to him. Only his tribe was spared.

Women, though, weren’t totally suppressed. They could receive higher education, hold professional jobs, wear Western clothes and generally had a reasonable amount of freedom. Much of that, it seems, is actually changing as the war presses on—at least on the surface. I’ve seen many more women in traditional Muslim head dresses and chadors—a reversion that may indicate how threatened they feel. If women are in Western-style dress, the militias, insurgents, criminals and thugs often will target them as working with the Americans, which has can mean a death sentence. Chadors and headscarves become protective coloring—camouflage. —Leslie Sabbagh