There Is A New Taliban

I refrained from posting this disgusting incident when I read about it last week and had to turn from AC 360 on CNN when they showed the video. While the right wing of this country battles to curb women's freedoms and rights, the "Taliban" of Iraq is quickly emerging. Yet another gift from the ousting and killing of Saddam: honor killings on the rise!

A slender, black-haired girl is dragged in a headlock through a braying mob of men. Within seconds, she is on the ground in a fetal position, covering her head in her arms in a futile attempt to fend off a shower of stones.

Someone slams a concrete block onto the back of her head. A river of blood oozes from beneath her long, tangled hair. The girl stops moving, but the kicks and the rocks keep coming, as do the victorious shouts of the men delivering them.

In the eyes of many in her community in northern Iraq, 17-year-old Duaa Khalil Aswad's crime was to love a boy from another religion. She was a Yazidi, an insular religious sect. He was a Sunni Muslim. To Aswad's uncle and cousins, that was reason enough to put her to death last month in the village of Bashiqa.

Women's groups say the video shows Iraq's backward slide as religious and ethnic intolerance takes hold.

"There is a new Taliban controlling the lives of women in Iraq," said Hanaa Edwar, a women's activist with the Iraqi Al-Amal Association a non-governmental group in Baghdad. "I think this story will be absolutely repeated again. I believe if security is not controlled, such stories will be very common."

The case has far broader dimensions in Iraq, where anger arising from it points to the ethnic, religious and sectarian discord that colors virtually every issue here—even a girl's killing.

That anger has been fueled by the release of the video images, made with a cell phone, that appeared on the Internet and that over the weekend was the focus of a CNN report.

Kurds, who include Yazidis, suspect Sunni Arabs of circulating the gruesome images to fuel anger against Yazidis and undermine the Kurdish community, which exercises a degree of autonomy in northern Iraq and is seeking more.

"It seems they are trying to make it big for political purposes," said Mohsen Gargari, a Kurdish member of parliament.

In an interview, he and two other Kurdish lawmakers condemned Aswad's killing. But they noted that in February a Sunni woman had been killed by relatives for having a relationship with a Yazidi man. "Nobody talked about it. Nobody filmed it or turned it into a big issue," he said. [Insert Qusan's blank stare! Is he saying that because no "turned it into a big issue" when Sunnis killed one of their women, it is okay? This proves the point that none of these men - regardless of sect - value women].

In a report released last month, the United Nations said so-called honor killings of women were on the rise in Iraq. In January and February alone, according to the report, at least 40 women had been killed for alleged "immoral conduct," which can range from sitting in a car with a man who is not a relative to adultery.

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