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"Honour Killing” Sparks Fears of New Iraqi
Conflict
15.5.2007
By IWPR staff in Iraq (ICR No. 221, 14-May-07) |
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The
Kurdish Yezidi minority has so far stayed well out
of Iraq’s internecine battles, but violence with
their Muslim neighbours has escalated following the
murder of a girl who apparently converted to Islam.
May
15, 2007,
Bashiqa (Northern Iraq, outside Kurdistan region)
Bashiqa, a small town sitting in lush green hills
east of the city of Mosul, used to be regarded as an
island of peace and stability while vast areas of
post-Saddam Iraq were plunged into civil war.
Home to a population that is 70 per cent Yezidi -
members of an old sect that is neither Muslim nor
Christian - Bashiqa was spared the sectarian and
ethnic strife between Arabs and Kurds, radical
Sunnis and Shia that plagued surrounding areas.
People from Mosul would drive the 25 kilometres to
Bashiqa to have picnics and to enjoy the tranquility
of a little town where Yezidi temples, Muslim
mosques and Christian churches stand in close
proximity, presenting a rare image of tolerant
coexistence.
Until April 7, that is. On that day, a furious mob
stoned a 17-year-old
girl to death while bystanders applauded and
filmed the killing on their cell phones.
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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 |
Her crime? Duaa Khalil Aswad, a Yezidi Kurd, had run
away from home because she had fallen in love with a
Muslim boy. It was not the first love story of its
kind, nor was it the first “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 local women’s
activists - but they rarely cause a stir.
Duaa’s case was different. This killing has had much
wider impact - unleashing widespread inter-communal
strife in a formerly peaceful area, which has
resulted in at least 20 deaths and the threat of
more violence.
In addition to fears of a new ongoing conflict
between Yezidis and Muslims, the case highlights the
absence of rule of law, and the acceptance that
family disputes should be dealt with by relatives
rather than outsiders from the judiciary, even when
the resolution involves murder. At least one
eyewitness said members of the security forces stood
by and did not intervene as Duaa was stoned to
death.
TRADITIONAL TABOOS LEAD TO MURDER
The story began when Duaa, a second-year student at
the Fine Arts Institute in Bashiqa, fell in love
with her neighbour, Muhannad, the owner of a nearby
cosmetics shop. Muhannad used to wait for Duaa after
her college classes, and her parents were aware of
the relationship.
The Yezidis are ethnic Kurds who practice a unique
religion that incorporates elements of ancient
faiths such as Zoroastrianism, as well as drawing on
Islam and Christianity. Dismissed by some as
“devil-worshippers”, the Yezidis have coped with
such misperceptions by keeping themselves to
themselves, while seeking not to antagonise other
communities.
One hard-and-fast rule of Yezidi tradition is that
marriage outside the faith is not permitted. To
circumvent this, Duaa reportedly asked Muhannad to
elope with her, but he refused, saying that Muslim
tradition recommends that both families give their a
blessing to a marriage.
Finally, Duaa decided to convert to Islam so that
she could marry Muhannad. She informed her parents,
who were not pleased, but did not take any action to
stop her. They appear to have regarded her decision
as a domestic matter, and not one for the wider
community.
When her tribe learned of her conversion, the girl
took refuge with a Yezidi cleric, a common practice
when people fear retribution. She stayed in the
cleric’s home, and her parents begged him not to
surrender her to anyone, according to Mustafa
Muslim, a grocer in the town.
On April 7, Aswad’s uncles came to the cleric and
told him that the family had forgiven the girl and
wanted her to return with them.
“She thought they had really forgiven her, when she
was going to her death,” said Muslim. “She was
wearing a black skirt and a red jacket with her hair
in a pony hair.”
After just a few yards, Duaa was surrounded by 13 of
her cousins, together with a large crowd of other
Yezidis.
“They started kicking and punching her, pulling her
hair and forcing her to the ground,” said Muslim,
who witnessed the event. “She was shouting for help.
Her father tried to get to her but the people
stopped him.”
In a subsequent interview with a local TV station,
the father said he had sent his brother to bring the
girl home, but had no idea that a group was waiting
to kill her.
A brutal execution lasting two hours followed, most
of which was filmed on mobile phones. The footage,
which circulated first among Mosul residents and
later on the internet, showed the girl on the ground
surrounded by a frenzied crowd. Young men beat and
kicked her, first throwing small stones and then
fetching bigger ones and large concrete bricks.
The girl, bleeding heavily, desperately tried to
protect her face with one hand and cover her naked
legs with the other after her dress was been torn.
After a while, she stopped moving. As she lay still,
the cheering crowd continued to throw stones at her.
Later, her killers took her body to the outskirts of
town, burned it and buried her remains with those of
a dog, to show they regarded her as worthless and
dirty.
A post mortem showed that Duaa died of a fractured
skull and spine.
According to the police chief in Mosul, most of the
killers were members of Duaa’s extended family -
mainly cousins and their friends.
Several local people interviewed subsequently by
IWPR reporters expressed support for the stoning,
and only few said it was wrong.
Eyewitness Samir Juma, a teacher, said policemen as
well as some Peshmerga soldiers belonging to the
Kurdistan Democratic Party, KDP, stood and watched
the killing without attempting to intervene.
The KDP seeks to control Bashiqa. Although it lies
outside the self-governing Kurdish region of
northern Iraq, the Mosul area is among the
territories which could be transferred to that
region in a referendum due later this year.
Police in Mosul say four people have been arrested
in connection with the murder and two more are still
on the run. All the suspects are relatives of Duaa.
Muhannad has fled the town.
MUSLIM OUTRAGE LEADS TO REPRISALS
The secluded nature of Yezidi society has enabled
this small community to remain neutral in the face
of growing tensions between Sunni and Shia groups.
But tradition, in this case the taboo on inter-faith
marriages that applies among Yezidis and Muslims,
created an atmosphere in which violence against
transgressors became socially acceptable. In the
case of Duaa’s murder, it paved the way for
reprisals by angry members of the surrounding Muslim
community, and potentially a growing sectarian
conflict.
Duaa’s case is not the first time conversion and
marriage prohibitions have led to violence. A few
months before she died, a family killed their
daughter because she had converted to Islam. They
shot her with a single bullet to the head, and
little attention was paid to the case.
Two months before Duaa’s death, a Yezidi man from
Shekan, a village near Bashiqa, eloped with a Muslim
girl. The girl was later found beheaded, allegedly
by Muslims from her own village, and several Yezidi
houses and religious sites were set alight.
These incidents may help explain why the killing of
Duaa escalated so swiftly into bloodshed between
Muslims and Yezidis.
On April 22, gunmen stopped a bus carrying workers
from a textile factory in Mosul. All the Muslims on
the bus were released unharmed. So were the
Christians – a community who these days are a common
target for Sunni extremists. Instead, the attackers
took the 23 Yezidi workers to Mosul’s Nur
neighbourhood and summarily executed them.
A Yezidi baker and three of his workers were killed
in Mosul on April 26, and two Yezidi policemen were
killed three days later.
In Mosul, Duaa was described by angry Muslims as
“our martyred sister” as they vowed retaliation.
At the same time, Yezidis were beaten up and kicked
out of their jobs and college dormitories not only
in Mosul but also in Dohuk, Erbil and Sulaimaniyah -
the three major towns of the Kurdish region.
In Erbil, the owner of the Mergasur Hotel confirmed
that up to 50 young men attacked the building and
tried to beat up Yezidi workers who were living
there. He closed the doors and called the police.
PUK Media, a Kurdish internet news outlet, reported
that many Yezidi workers were leaving their jobs and
returning to their villages for fear of retaliation.
In Erbil, Yezidi students from the Mosul area left
for home after some were injured in an attack on
their dormitory.
IWPR was told that some Muslim residents of Bashiqa
had been threatened and told to leave town.
FAITH OR TRADITION?
One contentious issue which may at first sight seem
of little relevance, but which may determine the
dynamics of Yezidi-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 confirmed she was a virgin.
IWPR was told in Bashiqa that the reason police did
not intervene during the killing or take action
immediately afterwards was that they believed Duaa
was guilty of “immoral behaviour”, in other words of
breaking a taboo prescribed by social tradition,
rather than changing faith.
Only when police heard that Duaa might have been
killed for abandoning Yezidism did they issue arrest
warrants.
The supreme religious leader of the Yezidis, Tahsin
Saeed Ali, condemned Duaa’s murder as "a heinous
crime”.
He sought to downplay the inter-faith implications
of the case, asserting that Duaa was killed because
of “old traditions", implying that the motivation
was social mores rather than religion.
POLITICAL CONSPIRACY THEORIES
In the complex political context in Mosul and the
surrounding Nineveh region, speculation is rife that
Duaa’s murder was really a plot by one of Iraq’s
political factions. Some of the conspiracy theories
seem to be coming from opposing factions seeking to
capitalise on the incident. These theories abound
despite the fact that the suspects are all relatives
of the dead woman, rather than outsiders.
Mosul is the administrative centre of Nineveh
governorate, but many Kurds aspire to reassign the
town and adjoining areas to the self-governing
Kurdish region. Under article 140 of the Iraqi
constitution of 2005, a vote has to be held by the
end of 2007 to decide whether disputed areas with
mixed populations - principally Mosul and Kirkuk -
should be annexed to the Kurdish region.
If the key “swing vote” between Kurds and Arabs in
Kirkuk is held by the Turkoman, the Yezidis around
Mosul could play a similar role. The majority of
Yezidis live close to the current boundary, and they
are believed to be divided on the issue of
annexation.
Some Bashiqa residents interviewed by IWPR were
convinced that the incident was in some way
orchestrated by pro-annexation groups trying to push
the Yezidis to side with the Muslim Kurds in a vote
to determine the area’s future.
“It was fabricated to urge people to take the side
of Kurdistan,” said Assim Khalil, a Yezidi civil
servant, adding that he believed Kurdish politicians
wanted to heighten fears of radical Islamists among
the community.
A local Kurdish politician, Ghayyath Soorchi of the
Patriotic Union of Kurdistan countered with the
claim that “Baathists and insurgents” were involved
in the killing.
Yet more scope for conspiracy theories was created
by the circulation of leaflets purporting to be from
the “Islamic State of Iraq” and offering protection
for any Yezidis who wanted to convert to Islam.
UNEASY PEACE
Meanwhile, a joint force of police and Iraqi army
soldiers has been sent to cordon off Bashiqa to ward
off reprisal attacks on either side.
Women’s groups and other NGOs staged a demonstration
outside the Kurdish parliament to protest against
the murder of Duaa and to call for changes to civil
law and curbs on the influence of religious and
tribal leaders.
Other voices calling for moderation were hard to
hear above the recriminations, in an area that until
recently was best known for peaceful coexistence.
Edo Bashar, a Yezidi and a former civil servant, was
outraged by a killing ostensibly committed in the
name of his community.
“Such penalties are unacceptable,” he said. “No
Yezidi religious text prescribes such a punishment.
People in the modern world will view the Yezidis as
a racist and unforgiving people lacking in either
intelligence or reason. Barbarism is no way to
uphold a religion.”
This article was compiled from the reports of a
number of IWPR contributors in Iraq.
iwpr net
Religious significance
The Yazidis 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.
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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