Murdered and forgotten: silent end for Iraqi victims of gender-based violence

SULAIMANIYAH, Iraq – In a sunny cemetery in northern Iraq, silence reigns over an abandoned corner, devoid of mourners, where women killed in gender-based violence lie in unmarked graves.

Domestic violence and femicide have long plagued conservative Iraqi society, particularly through so-called “honor killings” – the killings of women considered to have violated patriarchal social norms, often at the hands of close relatives.

In the unmarked section of the Siwan cemetery in Sulaymaniyah, the second city of the autonomous Kurdistan region, many tombstones are blank.

Some only have numbers matching forensic records, and the signs faded over time as wild brush covered the graves.

Lawyer and activist Rozkar Ibrahim, 33, pointed to three adjacent cemeteries, the final resting places of a man, a woman and their child.

The couple fell in love and had the child without their families’ approval, said Ms. Rozkar, who regularly visits the cemetery to learn the victims’ stories and honor their memory.

The couple had tried to flee Iraq for safety, but their relatives found them and killed them along with the child, she said.

“They are all buried here,” Ms. Rozkar said.

“The gravedigger buries most of these women at night” to prevent relatives worried about their family’s reputation from damaging the graves, explained the activist, who believes that these anonymous and humiliating burials “should not exist”.

In 2020, the Kurdistan Regional Government ordered that existing graves be marked with the word “life” and new ones be engraved with names and dates of birth.

Although complete figures do not exist, Mr Othman Saleh, a 55-year-old gravedigger in Siwan, said that in 15 years he had buried around 200 women and girls – some as young as 13 – who were “killed, burned or suffocated”. “.

Alarming rhythm

According to the United Nations, more than a million women and girls in Iraq are at risk of gender-based violence.

The threat usually intensifies during crises, of which this conflict-ridden country of 43 million people has seen many.

The Northern Kurdistan region, which wishes to present an image of relative stability and progress, adopted a law in 2011 criminalizing domestic violence.