Murder in the Name of Honor

by Rana Husseini

  After just a few yards, Duaa was surrounded by thirteen cousins who started kicking her, punching her and pulling her hair before pushing her to the ground. As she shouted for help her father heard and raced to the scene but was forcibly and violently held back by some of the large crowd that had gathered. Some filmed what followed on their mobile phones.

  Duaa’s attackers tore her skirt, exposing her legs – an act intended to shame the girl who had damaged her family’s honour. One man kicked her between her legs, another painful, degrading symbol. The brutal execution continued for almost thirty minutes. The cheering crowd threw larger and larger stones. Duaa gave up trying to cover her legs with her arms, using them instead to cover her head to try to deflect the dozens of rocks that flew at her.

  When a large brick struck the back of her head, she stopped moving for a few moments. She then tried to sit up while screaming for help but her murderers chanted ‘Kill her, kill her.’

  Finally, one of her cousins picked up a huge rock, struggling under its weight, and dropped it on her forehead. The mob continued kicking her to make sure she was dead. Finally, Duaa’s killers took her body to the outskirts of Bashiqa where they burned and buried her remains with those of a dog, to show how worthless she was.

  According to the police chief in Mosul, most of the killers were members of Duaa’s extended family – mainly cousins and their friends. A post mortem showed that Duaa died of a fractured skull and spine.

  As the footage circled the globe, journalists started to arrive in Bashiqa and they interviewed several local people, most of whom expressed support for the stoning. Eyewitness Samir Juma, a teacher, said policemen as well as some Peshmerga soldiers belonging to the Kurdistan Democratic Party stood and watched the killing without attempting to intervene. News reporters also spoke of a small boy who was dragged to the front of the crowd and was made to watch Duaa being stoned to death.27

  It was not the first love story of its kind, nor was it the first so-called honour killing in a region where women are subject to strong social restrictions and face severe punishment for disregarding family, tribal or religious traditions.

  Such cases can no longer be covered up as easily these days, because of pressure from very brave local women’s activists – but they rarely cause a stir. Duaa’s case was different. This killing has had a much wider impact, thanks to the film footage from a mobile phone being broadcast around the world on the internet, providing horrific proof, finally, of the brutality of these murders committed in the name of honour.

  The killing also unleashed new horror and conflict in what had been until then one of the only peaceful areas left in Iraq. On 21 April 2007, a group of gunmen dragged more than twenty Yazidi men off a bus in the northern city of Mosul, about twenty miles south of Bashiqa, lined them up against a wall and gunned them down. The next day, a Sunni insurgent group linked to al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for a car bombing that targeted the offices of a Kurdish political party in northern Iraq, saying it was to avenge the death of Duaa.28

  Journalists were told that the reason police did not intervene during Duaa’s killing, or take action immediately afterwards, was that they believed Duaa was guilty of ‘immoral behaviour … breaking a taboo prescribed by social tradition, rather than changing faith.’

  It was only when the police heard that Duaa might have been killed for abandoning Yazidism that they decided to issue arrest warrants. One of the results of the international outrage about her death was the reaction by the supreme religious leader of the Yazidis, Tahsin Saeed Ali, who publicly condemned Duaa’s murder as ‘a heinous crime’. He sought to minimize the interfaith connection to her murder, saying that Duaa was killed because of ‘old traditions’, implying that the motivation was social rather than religious.

  Eventually, four of Duaa’s relations were arrested. Four others, including the cousin thought to have instigated the killing, were still at large. Provincial officials claimed that not much could have been done to stop the killing of Duaa, but confirmed that three officers were being investigated.

  Duaa’s murder has given a voice to the women’s movement in Iraq. Houzan Mahmoud, the spokeswoman for the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq, said, ‘The religious and social climate is such that people can murder in daylight and that the authorities will stand by and watch.’

  ‘There is a new Taliban controlling the lives of women in Iraq,’ said Hana Edwar, leader of the Amal Organization for Women, a non-governmental group in Baghdad. ‘I think this story will be absolutely repeated again … and will become common.’29

  One contentious issue, which may at first sight seem of little relevance, but which may determine the dynamics of Yazidi–Muslim conflict, is the argument over whether Duaa was stoned to death for converting to Islam or for losing her virginity before marriage.

  Sources close to the girl’s family claim that she did not convert to Islam, but wanted to run away with Muhannad, and it was this that provoked her cousins to punish her. A hospital autopsy, apart from confirming that she died from a broken skull and spine, also confirmed she was a virgin.

  Duaa’s case was by no means the first; it was simply the first to be noticed by the international community and the first to inspire public outrage in Iraq. A few months earlier, a family executed their daughter by shooting her in the head because she had converted to Islam. Her case received little attention.

  Two months before Duaa’s murder, a Yazidi man from Shekan, a village near Bashiqa, eloped with a Muslim girl. She was later found beheaded, allegedly by Muslims from her own village, and several Yazidi houses and religious sites were set alight.

  Almost a month after Duaa and the twenty Yazidi workers were killed, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) condemned the murders. A statement released on 2 May 2007 said, ‘The murder of Duaa in a so-called honour killing is a tragedy for her family and the entire community in Kurdistan. There is no justification whatsoever for this crime. Duaa’s death and the subsequent retaliation against the Yazidi community is a reminder to all of us, as individuals and as a society, that we have to continue to fight against the violent and archaic mindset that sadly persists today.’

  The KRG remains extremely concerned that Duaa’s killing might still be used as a pretext for the persecution of the Yazidi community: ‘We must all work together so that the ongoing violence and images of violence in parts of Iraq do not brutalize our society to the point where killing is seen as the easiest solution to disputes.’30

  As far as I am concerned, Duaa Aswad is a name that will never be forgotten. Several women’s groups have devoted themselves to revive her memory every year on 7 April. A group of activists also opened a forum for Duaa on Facebook to commemorate her tragic death.

  Roaa Basil, a human rights activist and programme manager at Al-Yaqeen Centre for Training, Development and Studies, has investigated the murder of Duaa. She told me that her family were now considered ‘outcasts’ in their own community and that they were forced to move after someone placed a bomb on their doorstep.

  One of her brothers has since sought political asylum in a European country while Muhannad is still in hiding. Duaa’s mother tries to visit her grave whenever she can; sometimes she is stopped and shooed away by people who still think Duaa has brought shame on the family. She told a reporter that all she wanted to do was water her daughter’s grave – the last thing Duaa had said to her was that she was thirsty – and people were even preventing her from doing that.

  * * *

  The Independent Women Organization in central Kurdistan conducted an analysis of 118 honour killings that mostly took place in the Souran Province from 1992 to 1998. They found that around sixty-six per cent of so-called honour crimes were motivated by anger over women’s desire for more freedom. For example, a woman named Begard in Malayan, Erbil, was burned to death by her husband. He had done so because she had gone to his brother’s wedding party without his permission. A thirty-five-year-old woman named Sa
kina Haji was shot to death by her brother on 20 August 1993 in Sheikh Wasan village because she had chosen her own husband.

  More recently, citing official KRG statistics, the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) recorded fifteen honour killings carried out with blunt objects, eighty-seven by burning and sixteen by shooting in the first quarter of 2007. In the second quarter, there were eight killings carried out with blunt objects, 108 by burning and twenty-one by shooting.

  A new addition to the list of murder weapons is the mobile phone. In Kurdistan, where there has been a sudden influx of cheap mobile phones, men are using them to take photos and record audio and video clips of women and girls who are breaking social codes. These are then widely distributed, damaging women’s reputations and putting their lives at risk. The first case is believed to have been in 2004, when footage of a seventeen-year-old girl having sex with a boy circulated in Erbil. Two days after the video was made public, the girl’s family killed her. A week after the incident, the boy was also killed by his family. In 2006, 170 cases of mobile phone-related violence were recorded. By 2007, this figure had more than doubled to 350, according to statistics compiled by women’s organizations and the Sulaimaniyah police directorate.

  For example, Salma, who asked that her real name be concealed, and who was hiding in a women’s shelter, said that her boyfriend passed on their intimate conversations on his phone to her family when she refused to marry him. The twenty-eight-year-old’s hand was broken during one of the beatings from her brothers, father and uncles.

  MPs have ordered legislation that they hope will protect women from mobile phone abuse that includes fines of between seventy-five thousand and one million Iraqi dinars (between sixty and 850 US dollars) or between six months and fifteen years in prison. Victims would also be able to sue for financial compensation.

  Banaz Hussein, deputy director of Asuda, a women’s rights NGO, said that she does not think that a law will stop the trend. Speaking to the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR), she said, ‘Kurdistan is developing, but people still adhere to the old customs and traditions. And women are still the primary victims.’31

  Youssif Mohamed Aziz, the Regional Minister of Human Rights, said, ‘The regional government of Kurdistan has formed a committee … to address all forms of violence against women and especially the “honour killings”.’ Since 2007, he said, awareness-raising campaigns have been conducted and human rights education has been introduced in schools.

  The KRG Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani said in July 2007, ‘Killing under the pretext of protecting honour is murder’, and called on religious leaders to use their influential positions to ‘spread a message of peace and tolerance in mosques and society’. Muslim leaders have indeed been denouncing the phenomenon as being against Islam, but there is still clearly a long way to go.

  * * *

  In Iraq, as in Jordan, the law is on the side of those who kill in the name of so-called honour. This was thanks to the late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, who introduced Article 128 of Law 111 of the Iraqi Penal Code in 1990 in an attempt to win tribal support. It read: ‘An appeal for murder is considered commutative if it is cited as a pretext for clearing the family name or as a response to serious and unjustifiable provocation by the victim.’ In January 2002, the UN Special Report on Violence against Women stated that more than four thousand Iraqi women have been victims of so-called honour killings since Article 128 came into effect.32

  Human rights activist Roaa Basil told me in a recent phone interview that there were many more so-called honour murders during Saddam’s regime – they were simply never made public. ‘The regime then suppressed the issue of violence against women, but women were being killed and subjected to all forms of violence by their families and no one could speak about this issue.’

  But judging by the sheer number of reports since the fall of the Hussein regime, violence against women has increased at an astronomical rate, with some professional women being deliberately targeted. The breakdown in law and order has contributed to this increase, because there are fewer restraints on violent young men determined to take the law into their own hands.

  In March 2004, US President George W. Bush said that ‘the advance of freedom in the Middle East has given new rights and new hopes to women ... the systematic use of rape by Saddam’s former regime to dishonour families has ended.’ This may have given some people the impression that the US and British invasion of Iraq had helped to improve the lives of its women. But this is far from the case.

  In September 2007, Ali Jasib Mushiji, aged seventeen, shot his mother and half-brother because he suspected them of having an affair. He also murdered his four-year-old sister, thinking that she was their child. From a cell in the Baghdad slum of Sadr City, he told a reporter that he wiped out his family in order to cleanse it of shame. He had thought about killing his mother for some time, but stated that it was only when the Hussein regime fell that he was able to get hold of a Kalashnikov and carry out his plan.33

  Ziyad Khalaf al-Ajely, a journalist writing for the IWPR, interviewed Faeq Ameen Bakr, Director General of Baghdad’s Institute of Forensic Medicine, in 2005. Bakr said that all too often he wrote the words ‘killed to wash away her disgrace’ in the many autopsy reports and investigations that landed on his desk.

  Bakr said it is difficult to track the number of such killings because they often go unreported. Sometimes women will try to take their own lives rather than face the wrath of their families, an example of which was demonstrated when the reporter returned to see Bakr at a later date. He noticed a crowd on the Bab al-Muadham bridge in Baghdad. A young girl had jumped from it. When a rescuer brought her out of the water – still alive – she told onlookers, ‘I am pregnant. They will kill me.’ She was taken to the capital’s Medical City hospital, where she had an abortion and was discharged.34

  According to a study conducted by the Ministry of Women’s Affairs that examined four hundred rape cases since the fall of Saddam’s regime, more than half of these victims were later murdered in honour killings. The authorities say they treat honour killings seriously, but punishments, when they are given, are hardly ever severe.

  In one case, a police captain was imprisoned for one month and docked a month’s pay for lending a gun to a friend who used it to murder his unmarried pregnant sister. The murderer received a six-month prison sentence.

  Possibly the most frightening place for any young woman to be taken to is the virginity-testing room in Baghdad’s forensics institute. Here, young women lie face up with their feet in stirrups and are examined by three male doctors. The findings are then written down and presented to suspicious family members. Girls often arrive in terror, knowing that the results of the test could result in their death.

  Women’s rights activist Amaal al-Mualimchi says women are so fearful of falling victim to so-called honour killings that they have become virtual prisoners in their own homes. ‘So women have two choices – exposing themselves to the threat of rape, after which they will be killed by their families, or house imprisonment,’ she said.

  Jwan Ameen of the Women’s Affairs Ministry is now trying to help women who face honour killings by establishing safe houses for them. Women’s groups are also calling for the protection of women to be included in the new constitution, which will soon be drafted by the National Assembly. ‘But we are still facing difficulties in implementing all of this because we don’t have a budget for it,’ said Ameen.

  Iraqi women activists say they themselves now live in fear of violence and can no longer walk in the street without covering their heads. Some female journalists have said they do not take any form of identification with them when they go out, in case they are stopped by extremists who might kill them.

  An activist recently told me that usually, when a family decides to kill one of their female relatives, they fill the bath with kerosene and wait for the woman to enter the room. The minute she steps inside, the elected killer immed
iately locks the door, pours kerosene under and on it and sets it ablaze. The family then claims that their female relative was killed accidentally. Because the current situation is still unstable, it is rare for the authorities to open an investigation into the matter. According to a December 2006 report by the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq in the Kurdish-governed north, 239 women were reportedly burned in the first eight months of 2006. Most of these cases have been investigated as accidents or suicide attempts.35 In Basra alone, police acknowledge that fifteen women a month are murdered for breaching Islamic dress codes.

  Mobile phones, too, can result in violence: a casual glance at the photo suggests that Shawbo Ali Rauf was sleeping peacefully on the grass – if it were not for the blood. The nineteen-year-old Iraqi was, according to her father, murdered by her own in-laws, who took her to a picnic area and shot her seven times. Her crime: having an unknown number on her mobile phone.

  In 2007, at least 350 women (double the figure for the previous year) suffered violence as a result of mobile phone ‘evidence’ in Sulaymaniyah, a city with one million inhabitants, according to Amanj Khalil of the IWPR, citing figures compiled by women’s organizations and the local police directorate. In the same city in the previous year, there were 407 reported offences against women, beheadings, beatings, deaths as a result of ‘family problems’ and threats of honour killings.

  Despite these outrages, recent calls to outlaw honour killings have been blocked by fundamentalists and the new Iraqi constitution remains a mass of confusing contradictions. While it states that men and women are equal under law it also decrees that Sharia law – which considers one male witness worth two females – must be observed. The days when women could hold down key jobs or enjoy any freedom of movement are long gone. The fundamentalists have sent out too many chilling messages. In Mosul two years ago, eight women were beheaded in a terror campaign. These crimes are all backed by laws, tribal customs and religious rules. Activists have urged the international community to condemn this barbaric practice and to help the women of Iraq.