As the sun went down and the sandstone tombs cast long shadows over the
village cemetery, Badi’aa Aswad threw herself on the mud grave of her
17-year-old daughter, Du’aa, and howled.
“Come to Mama, Du’aa,” she cried, caressing the plain concrete headstone. “The
last thing you told me was that you were hungry. Come home. Let me cook, and
feed you.”
Disturbed by the sobbing, a passer-by offered water in the hope of soothing
her. But Aswad screamed that she could not drink a drop.
“Du’aa is thirsty,” she shrieked, directing the stranger to pour the contents
of her water bottle over the dusty grave instead. “Yes, drink my baby, drink
my honourable girl, drink some water, light of my eyes.”
It is seven months since Du’aa was stoned to death by a mob in the Kurdish
hillside village of Basshiqa, northern Iraq, after being found with her
19-year-old boyfriend, Muhannad Ummayad, in an olive grove.
They were not lovers, though some in the crowd suspected they were. But Du’aa
was a member of the Yazidi sect, which teaches that the Earth is in the care
of seven angels. Yazidis are regarded as devil-worshippers by many Muslims
and Muhannad is a Sunni Muslim.
Their respective communities were outraged by their determination to marry and
while Muhannad was locked up in prison, Du’aa found herself dragged to the
marketplace for an honour killing.
Last week, Du’aa’s family spoke for the first time about the events that led
to the stoning, which has been widely condemned after mobile phone clips
were posted on the internet.
The footage was said to have prompted a revenge massacre of 23 Sunnis in
nearby Mosul. But far from curbing honour killings, Du’aa’s death has been
linked with a sharp increase in them.
According to the human rights ministry in northern Iraq, 598 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 the whole of
2006.
It was around 7pm on April 5 when Du’aa told her family that she was taking
out the rubbish, then disappeared. The following morning an anonymous caller
said she was with a Muslim man.
The caller threatened to kill her in order to “wash away her shame”, so her
father Khalil, a 49-year-old civil defence official, and brother Nebraas
went to the police. Within hours, the couple were discovered among the
olives.
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.
In the marketplace, she came under a hail of stones and her face and clothes
were soon covered in blood. Among those hurling the stones were several male
cousins from her father’s side of the family and one – Araas – from her
mother’s.
It was Araas who approached as she tried to struggle to her feet and smashed a
large piece of concrete over her head to finish her off. He told police he
had done it as “an act of mercy to put her out of her misery”.
While Araas is still being held, Uncle Salim and the tribal leader, Hamko, are
on the run. Du’aa’s father has named 20 other men as her killers. Nobody
told her parents she was dead until the following day. Her two brothers then
dug her body out of a rubbish pit for burial in the cemetery, where the
grave has been attacked.
A grenade lobbed into the garden of the family’s home last month shattered
windows and left them in no doubt that the community wants them to leave.
One of the most shocking things about Du’aa’s death, however, is that although
stoning is rare, honour killing is rampant, particularly in Kurdish areas of
Iraq and Iran. Kurdish women are killed almost every day for “dishonouring”
their families.
A law introduced in northern Iraq in 2002 allowed such killers to be convicted
of murder – in theory exposing them to the death sentence. In practice, it
has made little difference.
Dalia Dzay, head of research studies at the human rights ministry, said the
perpetrators were simply finding new ways of achieving the same grisly end,
for instance by forcing women to set fire to themselves so that their deaths
looked like accidents with cooking fuel.
Then there is a whole new class of victims to consider – those who have fled
the threat of honour killings and are alone, terrified and destitute.
In a shelter at a secret location near the town of Suleimaniya, 12 women are
in hiding together for protection. One pretty girl with wide brown eyes who
identified herself only as “H”, described how she had fallen in love with a
young man from her district when she was 18 and he was 25.
Her father ordered her to marry an older business associate and was so enraged
when she refused that he sent her to live with her grandmother. There, she
learnt that her boyfriend had been shot dead by her father and brother, who
were bragging that she would be next.
Another woman there, “J”, was forced to marry a much older man when she was 16
but bumped into a former sweetheart while shopping. Relatives who saw them
chatting assumed the worst and drove the two of them to a remote area. J’s
nose was cut off with a knife; her ex-boyfriend lost an ear.
This weekend, The Sunday Times was granted access to a prison holding men who
have carried out honour killings. None expressed remorse.
One, Rustum Mohamed Ali, 32, has been unable to provide for his wife and four
children aged 7 to 12 since he was jailed two years ago for killing his
pregnant, unmarried niece and her lover.
First he confronted the lover in the garden of his home. “I begged him, in the
name of God and morality, to marry her in order to protect her honour and
the family’s,” he said.
When the man refused, Ali shot him with a Kalashnikov. He then went indoors,
where he claims his niece said: “I deserve to be killed.” He shot her with
the same weapon. “ No man can stand for his family’s honour to be defiled,”
he said.
The mentality seems as alien as ever to Du’aa’s mother in her grief. “May they
all burn in hell,” she said last week, stroking the end of the grave as if
washing her daughter’s feet. “You were a good girl, you were honour itself
and I miss you, so please come to me in my dreams, I beg you.”
Iranian and Kurdish Women's Rights
Organisation
Additional reporting: Ali Rifat
