Du’a Aswad was a beautiful Kurdish girl living in northern Iraq. She was seventeen years old when she fell in love with a Sunni Arab boy. One night she stayed out with him. Nobody knows if they actually slept together, but her family assumed that they had. When Du’a returned the next morning, she saw the rage in her family and ran to seek shelter in the home of a tribal elder, but religious leaders and her own family members insisted that she must die. So eight men stormed the elder’s house and dragged her out into the street, as a large crowd gathered around her. Honor killings are illegal in Iraqi Kurdistan, but security forces were present as Du’a was attacked, and they did not interfere. At least one thousand men joined in the assault. So many men in the crowd shot video clips with their cell phones that on the Web you can find a half-dozen versions of what happened next. Du’a was thrown to the ground, and her black skirt was ripped off to humiliate her. Her long, thick hair cascaded around her shoulders. She tried to get up, but the men kicked her around as if she were a soccer ball. Frantic, she tried to fend off the blows, to get up, to cover herself, to find a sympathetic face in the crowd. Then the men gathered rocks and concrete blocks and dropped them on her. Most rolled off, but she began bleeding. Some of the rocks struck her head. It took thirty minutes for Du’a to die. - Half the Sky, Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn - The world today is not the world that we think we are living in...
Posted on: Fri, 14 Nov 2014 14:45:35 +0000
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