who was Fern Holland?

The NYTimes Magazine investigates this woman and her fight for the rights of Iraqi women. It's a very detailed story about the enemies she made in Iraq, her reasons for being there, and her eventual murder.

Holland's story immediately took on mythic qualities. Rumors spread in Baghdad that she'd been riddled with 79 machine-gun bullets, a palpable symbol of Iraqi wrath against America. And in a way her story slipped effortlessly into a parable about American exceptionalism. Headstrong, reckless, idealistic, Americans have always believed in the power of will -- that one man or woman with enough faith and tenacity can at some moment pull off his or her vision. It happens here, in America, often enough. But in much of the rest of the world, the willful individual, moiling away against the system, may attain nobility in some moral order but is nonetheless fated to be crushed. These two perspectives are colliding in Iraq. The collision may, in the future, give way to some fruitful synthesis. For now, the result of the occupation is mostly carnage.

The New York Times > Magazine > Fern Holland's War