PROGRESS

''This day is something that has never happened before,'' FPS chief Faisel Muhsen Ali told the women at a short and no-frills ceremony.

''Before people said women were even but it was just words...This is the first time in Iraq women are doing real security work.''

Under Saddam Hussein's mainly secular rule, women enjoyed greater equality with men than in many other Arab states, holding jobs in business and government but not in the police.

Muslim clerics in Iraq have made little public objection to women working.

For the FPS, some women already carry out checkpoint searches, to avoid offending Iraqis by having women bodysearched by men. But Tuesday's graduates, who join about 1500 FPS officials assigned to the Water Resources Ministry, will do everything their male colleagues do.