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Old world met new world in April when cellphone cameras captured the barbaric stoning of a 17-year-old Yazidi girl in Kurdistan, broadcasting her death across the Internet, causing revulsion around the world.
The widespread condemnation sparked by the public circulation of the videos led to calls for reform and justice for Du'aa Khalil Aswaf, though it seems the event may have encouraged a spike in honor killings instead of movement to end them.
Hala Jaber of the Daily Telegraph reports that ccording to northern Iraq's human rights ministry, nearly 600 women have been burnt, beaten, shot, strangled, thrown from tall buildings, force-fed with lethal drugs, crushed by vehicles, drowned, decapitated or made to kill themselves so far this year, exceeding the 553 recorded for all of 2006.
Jaber visited the family of Du'aa for their first public interview since her death. Her family members were widely-reported to have instigated her stoning, but Jaber's research reveals that her parents were strongly opposed.
After Du'aa disappeared one day--found later hiding in an olive grove with her Muslim boyfriend--her family faced a schism as the ender males disagreed on how they should cleanse the family's honor.
In an effort to cool tensions, Du’aa was taken to the home of Sheikh Sulaiman Sulaiman, the senior Yazidi figure in the village. But her own relatives were bitterly divided over whether she should live or die.A 65-year-old uncle, Salim, a science teacher, backed the head of their tribe, Omar Hamko, 73, in demanding that she be killed to “cleanse the family honour”.
Her father would not countenance it. He proposed that she be married to a cousin and moved to Syria.
“She has committed a wrong for which she will be punished but not through death,” he declared. “I refuse to have my daughter killed.”
When the uncle insisted that he would decide Du’aa’s fate as the elder sibling and head of the local Communists, her father ordered him out of the house.
Her mother, meanwhile, had gone to see her for what would prove a poignant last meeting.
“I promise you I am still a virgin,” Du’aa said – the autopsy would confirm this – “and I did nothing wrong, Mama.”
Du’aa’s final words to her, recalled at the graveside, were: “I’m hungry, Mama.”
The next day, April 7, Hamko, the tribal leader, telephoned her Uncle Salim, saying there was a plot to smuggle her out of town.
Salim sent sons, nephews and party supporters to surround the home of the sheikh, firing shots into the air. “They came with guns and stones, shouting and screaming in anger,” the sheikh said last week.
Looking back on the terrible scenes that followed, he lamented the manner of Du’aa’s killing, but not her death.
“Honour is a big thing here and each one deals with it differently,” the sheikh said. “It was down to her family to cleanse her shame. Maybe kill her with one bullet, electrocution, any manner but not through this awful stoning.
“There is no father who does not love his daughter. When such a father kills his daughter to wash away their family shame, it breaks his heart to do so. But fathers are obliged to do this, otherwise they will be ostracised.”
The sheikh is blamed by Du’aa’s mother for what happened next. “He sent her out as a defenceless young girl,” she alleged. The mobile phone clips show her being taken straight from the sheikh’s house to the marketplace in a headlock, wailing and screaming as armed police watched in silence.
Within about 15 minutes of being dragged from the sheikh's house, Du'aa was dead, her bloodied lifeless having become the target for the masculine rage of dozens of locals, including some members of her family.
One cousin from her mother's side of the family can be seen in one video dropping a large block of concrete on her head in what was likely the fatal blow. He said he did it as an act of mercy, to end the suffering of the ongoing kicks and rocks raining down on her.
That cousin remains in jail, though Jaber's reports the older uncle and other major instigators of the attack to be "on the run."
Du'aa's death was only one example of a practice that takes place--in a variety of forms--nearly every day in Kurdistan, despite a 2002 law that makes it an illegal act punishable with the death penalty.
Jaber reports on a new kind of 'refugee' that is being created as a result--women who have had to flee from their own families in fear of their lives. She makes her way to a secret location in Sulaimaniyah, where a dozen women are living together in hiding.
Their experiences are tacked to the end of Jaber's piece to show that the practice of honor killing takes many different forms, though each one of their stories could deserve a headline of its own.
