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Life was supposed to get better for women in Iraq after the ousting of
Saddam. The reality has been rocketing rates of rape, murder, domestic
violence and infant mortality, reports leading US writer Katha Pollitt
The video, originally posted on jebar.info,
a Kurdish website, was soon plastered all over the internet: a young
girl in a red tracksuit jacket and black pants was being beaten, kicked
and stoned to death by a mob of excited, shouting men. It is a gruesome
marriage of 21st-century technology and medieval barbarity. At one
point, bloody and dazed, the girl tries to protect herself, whereupon a
man drops a big rock or lump of concrete on her face, killing her. Her
crime? Doaa Khalil Aswad, a 17-year-old member of the Kurdish Yazidi
religious minority, a non-Muslim sect, had fallen in love with a Sunni
boy and possibly converted to Islam. For this "crime" against family
and community, Doaa was murdered in the village of Beshika, near Mosul,
in a collective act of woman hatred, led by her brothers and uncles. In
the video you can see local policemen watching and one man recording
the killing on his mobile phone.
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OWFI’s Statement for
IWD
Today in many
societies in the Middle East, women are
regarded as second or third class
citizens. Recognition of women as free
human beings equal to men is off the
agenda for all governments in the
region. Every year thousands of women
fall victim to so-called "honour
killings", commit suicide under pressure
by setting fire to themselves and suffer
from daily abuses and violence. Women
are active fighting for their rights in
all public spheres, including as
workers, in many societies, but again
the culture of religious patriarchy is
so dominant that we are still not free
individuals on our own right.
