Editor's note: In our Behind the Scenes series, CNN correspondents share their experiences in covering news and analyze the stories behind the events. Here, CNN's Arwa Damon describes the hardships faced by Iraqi women. Her documentary airs this weekend on CNN and CNN International.



Nahla's husband returned to Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. He was killed in a bomb blast in 2007.



BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- The pain here is choking -- it's a dark, suffocating sorrow.



"They took my husband away in front of me. I found his body in the morgue a few days later. He had multiple bullet wounds and his eyes had been gouged out," one woman tells me, forcefully twisting a tissue in her hands as if it somehow could ease her agony and erase the chilling memory.



She didn't want her story told, too afraid that she would meet the same fate as the man she loved.



Her husband's body bore the "signs of torture." How many times has that phrase been used? It's such a common phrase it's as if what really happened gets glossed over: skin scraped off their bodies, fingernails ripped out, horrifying screams of pain before death.



How many times have we reported death tolls from one horrific bombing or another and not been able to get across that these are lives that literally were blown apart? No matter how hard we in the media try, Iraq remains a nation filled with untold tragedies, the scope of which so often is overwhelming.



And no matter how hard Iraqis try to shield themselves and those they love from the horrors here, more often than not they fail. Yet they keep fighting.  See the sacrifices of Iraq's women »



Nahla works at a radio station and is one of those women. She's tall, slender, elegantly dressed and has a firm handshake. I look at her and it's nearly impossible to imagine what she's been through.



"This numbers game, you always think that you are exempt from the numbers," Nahla tells me, referring to the daily death toll. "You're pained by them, but you are outside of them."  Watch Nahla's struggle to live on »



On April 14, 2007, her world shattered. There was an explosion on a bridge in the capital and 10 people were killed. Her husband, Mohammed, was one of them.



"And with it, I am motionless," she says. "Truly, life was in color and now it is in black and white. I feel like it is a game of musical chairs we used to play with others. ... One time you are hit with the chair; another time, someone else is. Now, my son and I are out of the game completely, completely."



The image of the man she loved, tall and proud, is of a doctor who moved his family back to Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein because he believed his country needed him. He was a father who doted on their 6-year-old autistic son.



Also etched into her memory is the image of his charred body, melted together with nine others, a twisted pile of black, scorched flesh.



Yet Nahla's voice is calm as she speaks, only breaking at the very end of our conversation, when the pain, buried so deep, rises to the surface. She couldn't suppress her gut-wrenching dry sobs.



I don't know how many times I have heard stories like hers after nearly five years of war here, and yet I still get chills. I can't stop being in awe -- nor can I stop looking at these women in amazement. Life in Iraq has forced people to confront horror that would leave many of us paralyzed.  Watch a divorcee forced to live amid squalor with her kids »



Where do they find the strength to keep going?



Some don't and choose to live out their lives as hollow shells, just waiting for this wretched existence to be over. But so
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2007. 2007. Iraq CNN the hardships faced by Iraqi women. hardships faced by Iraqi women.
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