Family kills girl, video on web

2007-05-05 16:26

Baghdad - Cellphone videos have appeared on the internet showing an Iraqi mob stoning and kicking to death a 17-year-old girl after she offended her community by eloping with a Muslim man.

Doaa Khalil Aswad was a member of northern Iraq's Yazidi minority and, according to reports in the Kurdish media, her family murdered her last month after she fell in love with a Muslim.

In the video, Aswad is shown lying on a road as men kick her and throw a large lump of rock or concrete at her head. Her face is drenched in blood.

Uniformed and armed officers of the Iraqi police stand by as a crowd storms her home. They do nothing to prevent the attack.

The slim, dark-haired girl is wearing a red tracksuit top and black underwear and during the beating, someone drapes a jacket over her to cover her bare legs.

At one point, she struggles to sit up and cover herself, but a man kicks her in the face knocking her violently back to the ground.

The assault continues for several minutes and she does not appear to cry out or resist her attackers.

Revenge attacks

Members of a large crowd can be seen filming the murder on their cellphones, some of them shouting or kicking out at the cowering victim.

Nobody tries to help her.

When news of Aswad's murder surfaced last month, it triggered an apparent revenge attack.

On April 23, gunmen stopped a bus carrying workers from her community, dragged out 23 Yazidis and shot them dead in vengeance for what they saw as the murder of a Muslim convert.

Last week, the United Nations' quarterly report on human rights in Iraq expressed serious concern over a rise in so-called "honour killings" of women deemed to have betrayed their families in Kurdish Iraq.

Yazidis - who number 500 000, mainly in northern Iraq - speak a dialect of Kurdish but follow a pre-Islamic religion and have their own cultural traditions.

They believe in God the creator and respect prophets, especially Abraham, from the Biblical and Q'uran prophets, but their main focus of worship is Malak Taus, the chief of the archangels, often represented by a peacock.

Followers of other religions know this angel as Lucifer or Satan, leading to popular prejudice that the secretive Yazidis are devil-worshippers.

- AFP