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Seven months since Du’a was stoned to
death 'Honour' killings grow
6.11.2007
By Hala Jaber, Erbil, Kurdistan-Iraq |
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November
6, 2007,
Bashiqa (Northern Iraq, outside Kurdistan region)
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
Kurdish 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. Yazidi are Kurds, a religious sect
whose followers are generally situated in northern
Iraq outside autonomous Kurdistan region. Some
350,000 Yazidis live in villages around Mosul.
www.ekurd.net
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.
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Du’a Khalil Aswad
Dua Khalil Aswad, The teenager was dragged outside
by 8 or 9 men and stoned for half an hour until she
died. Her boyfriend is now in hiding in fear for his
life |
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 Kurdistan
'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.
www.ekurd.net
“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
Sulaimaniyah in Kurdistan region, 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
timesonline co.uk
Religious significance
The Yazidis are Kurds, they consider Melek Taus to be a benevolent
angel that has redeemed himself from his fall, and
has become a demiurge who created the cosmos from
the Cosmic Egg. After he repented, he cried for 7000
years, his tears filling 7 jars, which then quenched
the fires of hell.
Melek Taus is sometimes transliterated Malak Ta'us
or Malik Taws. In Semitic languages, malik variably
means "king" or "angel". Taus is
uncontroversially translated "peacock"; however, it
is important to note that peacocks are not, at least
currently, native to the lands where Melek Taus is
worshipped.
This has lead some to speculate that the worship of
Melek Taus was imported from India, though it is
more likely the peacock iconography is a development
from earlier representations depicting the god as a
native fowl, such as a bustard.
www.ekurd.net
The Yazidi believe
that the founder of their religion, Sheikh Adi Ibn
Mustafa, was an avatar of Melek Taus. In art and
sculpture Melek Taus is depicted as peacock. The
Yazidi are thought to be unique in their depiction
of their primary god as a bird.
More About Yazidi From Wikipedia
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