TRUDY RUBIN A selfless humanitarian is killed in Iraq

I had intended to write about the likely impact of a strong-willed woman on U.S. foreign policy -- meaning Secretary of State-designate Condoleezza Rice.
Instead, I feel compelled to write about the life -- and death -- of another strong-willed woman, Margaret Hassan, the Irish-born director of Care International in Iraq, who appears to have been brutally murdered by kidnappers. A month after she was snatched by armed men in Baghdad, a video passed to al-Jazeera television seems to show her being shot in the head by a hooded militant.
DNA tests were being conducted to find out whether the mutilated body of a Western woman dumped on a street in Fallujah is indeed hers.
No one could have imagined such a fate for the 59-year-old Hassan, who was married for 30 years to an Iraqi whom she had met in London. She was a convert to Islam and a dual Irish-Iraqi citizen who devoted her life to helping the people of her adopted country. The idea that she should be the first foreign woman kidnap victim to be murdered (eight have been released) almost defies comprehension.
So noted were her good works that the hard-line clerics who were running Fallujah called on her kidnappers to release her. So, too, did a message on a militant Web site claiming to be from the terrorist group of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, which has beheaded male foreigners (including Nick Berg) and carried out suicide bombings.
In other words, Hassan's goodness was so apparent, her brave work for hospitals and water purification projects and children's nutrition so well known, that even hardened jihadis didn't want to be associated with her murder. Probably, they feared it would turn the Iraqi public against them. Indeed, the group that killed her -- which sent out other horrid videos showing her begging for her life -- didn't identify itself.
So what are we to make of her murder, beyond anger that such horrors continue unabated in Iraq?
One clue lies in an interview I did with Hassan in her Baghdad office in May 2003. This slim, erect woman, her bangs and brown pageboy streaked with gray, didn't want to talk about her fascinating personal history. She was eager to describe what needed to be done in order to restore water and services and jobs to shell-shocked Iraqis.
Security
The most essential element, she repeated over and over, was to restore security to Baghdad and Iraq. Everything else depended on that.
"This is a country in limbo," Hassan told me, "which has neither shaken off the past or discovered its future.
"There is a breakdown of almost everything. This city of 5 million was a very safe city. There was stealing, but not acts of violence against people."
She then told me a story about the father of one of the CARE drivers who was held up at 10 a.m. on a busy street by criminals who shot in the air and seized his car. Such violence became commonplace in the months after the fall of Baghdad.
Soon, former Saddam secret police and officials gauged that the U.S. occupation was too undermanned and unprepared to restore order. They then started organizing an insurgency that used car bombs and assassinations of Iraqis -- and kidnappings. The goal: to prove that the Americans can't or won't restore calm, so Iraqis will yearn for the stability they knew under the Baath Party.
I still vividly remember Hassan decrying "this whole thing of fear that you might be killed by someone unknown to you." She said this fear hampered all efforts to resurrect normal life for Iraqis. She was describing a phenomenon that would one day cost her her life.
I believe that only former Saddam thugs would be willing to murder Hassan -- a selfless humanitarian and a Muslim, Iraqi woman. Why? Because they believe Iraqis have become so distrustful of U.S. intentions that her murder will make them angrier at the occupation, rather than turn them against the insurgents.
The challenge for Secretary of State-designate Rice and her boss is to reverse that equation or face disaster. Meanwhile, we should all mourn Margaret Hassan's tragic end.
X Trudy Rubin is a columnist and editorial-board member for the Philadelphia Inquirer.