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Fallout from stoning embodies Iraq’s discord

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Times Staff Writer

The video is shaky, but the brutality is clear.

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 with 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, a member of an insular religious sect. He was a Sunni Muslim. To Duaa’s uncle and cousins, that was reason enough to put her to death last month in the village of Bashiqa.

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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 rights activist. “I think this story will be absolutely repeated again. I believe if security is not controlled, such stories will be very common.”

But the case has far broader dimensions in Iraq, where anger arising from it points to the ethnic and religious discord that colors virtually every issue here -- even the slaying of a teenage girl.

That anger has been fueled by the video images, made with someone’s cellphone, that appeared on the Internet and that over the weekend were the focus of a report on CNN.

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.

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In an interview, he and two other Kurdish lawmakers condemned Duaa’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.

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, according to the report, at least 40 women had been killed for alleged “immoral conduct,” such as sitting in a car with a man who is not a relative or having an adulterous relationship.

Unlike Duaa’s death, none was known to have caused revenge attacks, much less political sniping.

Two weeks after the April 7 stoning, gunmen dragged more than 20 Yazidi men off a bus in the northern city of Mosul, about 20 miles south of Bashiqa, lined them up against a wall and executed them. The next day, a Sunni insurgent group linked to Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for a car bombing that targeted the offices of a Kurdish political party in northern Iraq, saying it was to avenge the death of Duaa.

“We are expecting more violence, but we already have paid the price,” said Mahama Shangali, a Yazidi member of parliament.

Shangali said three of his cousins had been killed recently in Mosul, home to a large Yazidi community. Edan Ashaik, a Yazidi living in Mosul, said that in the last month followers of the sect had been warned by Arabs to leave the city. Yazidi college students have fled the university in Mosul for fear of being attacked.

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“I have to repeat my courses next year or go in disguise to take the exams,” said Amal Jibor, a 23-year-old would-be university graduate who said she and her family had left Mosul and were living with relatives in a cramped house in Bashiqa. Jibor said most Yazidis opposed the stoning death, but she echoed the politicians’ view that the case was being exploited.

“It was an ordinary problem, but it was made use of and was fabricated into a political cause,” Jibor said.

Shangali and many other Yazidis, as well as non-Yazidi Kurds, are convinced that the circulation of the video is part of a plot to drive a wedge in the Kurdish community of northern Iraq. They say this would hamper the ability of Kurds to pass a referendum planned this year on autonomy for some northern areas, including the city of Kirkuk.

Sunni Arabs oppose Kurdish autonomy and oppose holding the referendum, whose date remains in question.

“In order to prevent this from happening, they have used this to unite opposition to the Yazidis,” Shangali said. Asked who “they” are, Shangali cited hard-line supporters of late former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, a Sunni Arab whose campaign to “Arabize” much of northern Iraq led to displacement of hundreds of thousands of Kurds.

Gargari and Adil Barwari, another Kurdish lawmaker, agreed.

Since Hussein’s ouster in April 2003, Kurds have begun returning to their hometowns in the north, and Kurdish-Arab tensions in the region have risen. In the last month, once-placid areas of the north have been experiencing car bombings and other violence, which Kurdish leaders blame on Sunni Arab insurgents loyal to Al Qaeda.

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The Yazidis say they have faced persecution under a succession of rulers, starting with the Ottomans and lasting through Hussein, because of their religious beliefs. They are neither Christian nor Muslim and worship the archangel Malak Taus, who is depicted as a royal blue peacock. Estimates of the Yazidi population in Iraq range from 350,000 to 500,000.

They are fiercely insular, opposing marriage to non-Yazidis and making it virtually impossible for non-Yazidis to convert to their religion. Shangali said the aim is part of their effort to preserve the tiny minority’s purity, not to shut anyone out.

Accounts of what happened to Duaa vary, but some things are clear. She had begun a relationship with a young Sunni Arab. In an effort to separate the two, and apparently to protect Duaa from an enraged uncle and cousins, her father took her to a Yazidi clergyman’s house in Bashiqa. Duaa remained there for a week until April 7, when the uncle and at least two male cousins abducted the girl from the priest’s custody.

Then, as several Iraqi police officers stood by, they led hundreds of others in the stoning. On the video of the attack, uniformed security officers can be seen standing nearby, and several men can be seen taking photographs of the girl with their cellphones. At one point, Duaa manages to push herself up to a sitting position, but a powerful kick knocks her back to the ground.

Nobody is seen trying to intervene, though one voice shouts, “Stop it!”

A family member who did not want to be identified said Duaa’s father, Khalil Aswad, tried to prevent the killing and had accused his brother, Saleem, of orchestrating it. Gen. Wathiq Hamdani of the local police said Saleem Aswad was one of several people being sought in connection with the stoning. He said the police who did not help the girl also faced arrest.

However, as of Saturday, Hamdani said no arrests had been made.

The story of the stoning has received relatively little attention in Iraq despite the release of the video. The news of the killing of the Yazidi men two weeks later in apparent retaliation for Duaa’s death drew more attention from the local media.

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Iraqi women say that’s a sign of the obsession with the sectarian and political implications of violence at the expense of concern about women’s rights.

“I am really sorry that we have turned to processing issues this way,” said Ghasan Alyas, a Yazidi teacher living in Bashiqa.

“Some say that external forces are behind what happened,” she said, referring to the accusations of Arab meddling. “But I think this is an illusion. The thought of a third party invisibly involved in whatever is happening is just a way of excusing ourselves and our ignorant culture from its responsibilities.”

susman@latimes.com

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Times staff writers Zeena Kareem and Salar Jaff in Baghdad and special correspondent Ruaa Al-Zarary in Mosul contributed to this report.

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