Death of high-profile Iraqi women sparks fear of witch-hunt
We have seen it before with brothels being
bombed and nightclubs being shot at. This is a message to “know your place”. I
fear that people will soon listen. And I don’t think these crimes will be
solved.' Sura Ahmed, a Baghdad
university student
Even to a country
inured to violence, the images were shocking. A man on a motorbike pulled up
next to a car window and fired three shots at Tara al-Fares, killing her on a
Baghdad street. The
daylight
assassination, captured by a surveillance camera, was both brazen and familiar
to Iraqis who lived through the civil war and painful decade since. Yet it was also
shockingly distinctive; the body slumped in the car seat was not a politician,
official, insurgent or warlord. She was a former beauty queen; a young woman
with both profile and attitude, one of four high-profile Iraqi women to have
been killed across the country in quick succession.
The four were unknown
to each other, but their lives – recently at least – had shared common themes.
All had a public presence and a voice that had unsettled elements of Iraqi
society, which has retained rigid views on how women should behave, even as
relative freedoms have crept into a still conservative culture. To reveal one such
trait in post-war Iraq is
daring, many Iraqi women say. To proudly showcase both can be reckless.
The effervescent
Al-Fares has become a lightning rod for all four deaths, and sparked a rare
public discussion in Iraq about
how far women have come in the 15 years since the US invasion, the proponents
of which had vowed that civic freedoms and individual liberties would somehow
emerge from the ensuing chaos. The death of Al-Fares,
22, last Friday, followed the killing of Suad al-Ali, a women’s rights activist
in the southern city of Basra, who was gunned down as she walked to her car.
In
August, two more Iraqi women, Rasha al-Hassan and Rafifi al-Yasiri were killed
one week apart. Both worked in beauty clinics. Iraq’s acting prime
minister, Haider al-Abadi has said that that the deaths are not random events
and has pledged to hunt down the attackers. Iraqi women have gone further.
Zainab Salbi, an Iraqi who leads the institute Women for Women International
in Washington said “Women are being hit left right and centre. Everywhere. We
are living in the modern witch-hunt.” Al-Fares did not fit
the mould. A divorced single mother who had married at 16, she had swayed her
way into Iraqi homes with short skirts and makeup on social media platforms.
She had 2.7 million Instagram followers and was popular on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.
All are hugely popular in Iraq, where living vicariously remains acceptable –
but maintaining a high profile brings danger, especially for women. “We can go to Lebanon
and dress how we want,” said Hadeel Muthanar, who identifies herself as a
socially conservative 28-year-old from east Baghdad. “Even Iraqi men will look
the other way there. But to do the same in Baghdad is shameful. This is
two-faced, but it’s the way we are.” Al-Fares, born to a
Lebanese Shia mother and an Iraqi Christian father, made little attempt to bow
to the norms that many expected of her. Her profile was created as a challenge
to double standards that many in Iraq complain about but remain unwilling to
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