Harmony and Peace

2008-08-11T02:29:00.000-07:00

The girl who was stoned to death for falling in love

by NATALIE CLARKE
Last updated at 00:52 17 May 2007

A teenage girl lies dead on the ground in a pool of her own blood.

Her once groomed hair is cast across her face like a rag doll's, her skirt pulled up to complete her humiliation.

In another image, she is seen lying on her side, her face battered and bloodied, barely recognisable.

The concrete block used to smash in her face lies next to her.

Du'a Khalil Aswad was beaten, kicked and stoned for 30 minutes at the hands of a lynch mob before one of her attackers launched a carefully aimed fatal blow.

The murder was carried out in public, watched by hundreds of men cheering and yelling. Du'a's crime? To fall in love with a Sunni boy. Her family practised the Yezidi religion.

The Sunnis and Yezidis hate each other. When Du'a ran away with her Sunni boyfriend, a sentence of death was passed on her.

This act of medieval savagery took place last month in a town in northern Iraq, in the fledgling 'democracy' created by Bush and Blair when they invaded the country in 2003 and 'freed' its people.

The sickening scenes, which defy belief in every sense, were captured by some of the observers and participants who thought it would be proper to record these harrowing events as some sort of memento.

Perhaps they thought it would serve as a warning to other young people who dared to follow their hearts - not the strictures of a religion which will not brook dissent - and punishes adolescent impetuosity with the most brutal of public murders.

The killing was filmed on a number of mobile phones. The images were then - all too predictably - posted on the internet.

The Mail takes no pleasure in publishing these pictures. But we believe our readers should witness the depths of the depravity still being carried out in the 21st century in the name of 'honour'.

Perhaps, then, something can be done to prevent it happening again.

Of course, anyone who takes even a passing interest in news is all too aware of the tragedy that has engulfed the people of Iraq: the daily bombings, murders and kidnappings.

The subjugation of its women, however, has been largely ignored. Yet according to cultural observers, the number of so-called 'honour killings' has increased in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein.

Campaigners say there is an 'epidemic' of such killings in the wartorn country. Autopsy reports in Baghdad often conclude with the verdict: "Killed to wash away her disgrace."

The filming of Du'a's death was just one more macabre element of her killing, but it has achieved something those bloodthirsty amateur filmmakers could not have predicted: it has brought such practices into the open and exposed them to the wider world.

It is, of course, too late for Du'a, a strikingly pretty young girl with long auburn hair. The 17-year-old must have hoped that the 'liberation' of her country would afford her opportunities she might otherwise never have had - for her education and a life of happiness free from oppression.

She lived with her family in the town of Bashika, near Mosul. They were neither rich nor poor.

It is believed Du'a met her Sunni boyfriend - whose name is not known - several months ago. They had grown up in an environment where hatred against rival factions is the norm.

The Yezidis - a Gnostic sect which combines Islamic teachings with Persian religions - despise the Sunnis; the Sunnis loathe the Yezidis.

Du'a and her boyfriend would have been all too aware that theirs was a forbidden love. But like so many teenagers before them, right back to the illicit love of Romeo and Juliet, they couldn't help themselves.

For a while, they met in secret. It was during one such highly charged meeting that they came up with a plan to run away together.

It is not clear whether this desperate measure was a result of their having sought and been refused permission to marry, or if they decided to do it knowing that such permission would never be obtained.

"Her family would never have agreed to such a marriage," says Diana Nammi, a leading Kurdish women's rights campaigner.

Some Muslim groups have claimed that Du'a converted to Islam shortly before her murder. According to other reports, her boyfriend denies this.

They ran away together to an address in Bashika. The girl's family alerted the police and Du'a and her boyfriend were found just a few days later.

According to Ms Nammi, who is calling for the girl's killers to be brought to justice, Du'a was arrested and put into prison.

A few days later, the police apparently received assurances from the leader of her tribe - who Ms Nammi believes is Du'a's uncle - that the girl would not be harmed.

What happened next is the subject of conflicting reports. According to some, the house of the tribal leader was stormed by a mob and Du'a dragged out and killed.

Ms Nammi, however, says she has information that it was the tribal leader who betrayed his niece to the mob. In this man's eyes, Du'a had committed an unforgiveable crime, punishable by death.

The family's 'honour' had been besmirched. The moment Du'a was placed in his house, her fate was sealed.

On April 7, Du'a was brought out of the house in a headlock to face the lynch mob. Hundreds of men were waiting for her - the excited atmosphere is said to have resembled a large sporting event - but no women.

On the video, Du'a's screams can be heard as she is dragged to the ground. In a further humiliation, her lower body has been stripped.

Instinctively, Du'a tries to cover herself; only later was a piece of clothing thrown over her.

She is surrounded by an enormous crowd jockeying for a good view of the ritualistic killing. About nine men take part in the attack, including, it is thought, members of the girl's family.

To any father of a daughter, that a helpless girl should be set upon with such cowardly savagery is beyond comprehension. One can barely imagine her terror.

It is a profoundly disturbing spectacle. One man kicks her hard between the legs as she screams in agony. Du'a tries to lift herself up, but someone hurls a concrete block into her face.

Another man stamps on her face. Someone kicks her in the stomach. Police officers stand idly by, some of them apparently enjoying the spectacle as much as anyone else.

Meanwhile, some observers film the execution on their mobile phones - the modern world intruding on a spectacle that belongs more in the Roman arena than in an apparently civilised society.

After half an hour of this savagery, Du'a is finally - mercifully, perhaps - dead. In a final humiliation, a man tries to lift her up, but drops her again, and her bloodied body is rolled face down into a puddle of blood. The family has had its 'honour' restored.

According to Ms Nammi, Du'a's parents did not want her to be stoned, though it is not clear whether they might have agreed for her to be killed in some other way.

After her murder, according to Ms Nammi, two men were arrested by Iraqi police, but she has heard they were subsequently released without charge.

Reports suggest that two of Du'a's uncles and four other people fled the town as investigators began to search for the culprits. It is thought these included her brother, who appeared in the video of the murder.

As for Du'a's boyfriend - who has lost the girl he loved in the most awful circumstances imaginable - he went into hiding for a while, but it is believed that no action has been taken against him.

Du'a was buried in a simple unmarked grave. Later, says Ms Nammi, her body was exhumed by the Kurdish authorities, who have autonomous control of the region, and sent to the Medico-legal Institute in Mosul.

There her body was examined to find out whether she had been a virgin or not, before being returned to the Sheikh Shams cemetery.

To our Western eyes, this posthumous assault on Du'a's body is the final insult. But according to Ms Nammi, it did at least establish that she was still a virgin and innocent of the 'crime' of which she had been accused.

However, Ms Nammi believes the mere fact that Du'a had run off with a Sunni boy would have been enough to have her sentenced to death.

Meanwhile, the cycle of tit-for-tat murders continues in Iraq. In this instance, in an apparent act of retaliation for Du'a's murder, 23 Yezidi workers were attacked and killed two weeks later, apparently by members of an armed Sunni group.

The men were travelling on a bus between Mosul and Bashika when their vehicle was halted by the gunmen, who made them disembark before killing them.

Tomorrow evening, Ms Nammi, founding member of the Iranian and Kurdish Women's Rights Organisation, will lead a group of women meeting in Shoreditch, East London, to remember Du'a Khalil Aswad and give back to her the dignity torn from her by her violent death.

The women are pledged to campaign against the entrenched beliefs which lead to such senseless deaths - and the fact that the people who commit these crimes are not regarded as murderers, but as heroes of the community.

According to Ms Nammi, there have been an estimated 10,000 cases of honour killings in the Kurdistan region in the past decade.

Under Iraqi law, the punishment for anyone found guilty of an honour killing is just six months in prison.

"Something has to be done to stop this," says Ms Nammi, who came to Britain in 1996. "There is an epidemic of so-called honour killings. It is almost routine and utterly unacceptable.

"We would greatly appreciate any contribution from the British Government in preventing these murders of women in Iraq."

Ms Nammi has the support of Amnesty International.

"This young girl's murder is truly abhorrent and her killers must be brought to justice," says Kate Allen, Amnesty International UK Director.

"Unless the authorities respond vigorously to this and other reports of crimes in the name of "honour", we must fear for the future of the women in Iraq."

For the sake of 17-year-old Du'a, an innocent girl who simply fell in love with the wrong man, it is all too little, too late.

Present Breakthroughs

2008-08-11T02:09:00.000-07:00

Inventions and Technological Breakthroughs

Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS). Space is full of high-energy particles of many types (collectively called "cosmic rays"), many of them originating in supernova explosions in distant galaxies. AMS detects them using a huge superconducting magnet and six highly specialized, ultra-precise detectors. It will sit on the International Space Station's (ISS) main truss--far above the obscuring atmosphere, and making full use of the ISS's irreplaceable support systems--and gather data for three years. MIT Physics Professor Ulrich Becker, in collaboration with many institutes world-wide, works on the AMS, searching for anti- and dark matter from space using a TRD to isolate positrons.

Deep-Space Rocket Propulsion Systems. Franklin Chang-Diaz SCD '77, director of the Advanced Space Propulsion Laboratory at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, won Discover Magazine's 2003 Innovation Award for Space Science and Technology in the space explorer category. He has been developing a rocket engine that is expected to enable long-term human exploration of outer space.

Mars Biosatellite. In 2006, a team of engineers and scientists from MIT, as well as other researchers from around the world, hope to launch mice into a low Earth orbit aboard a rotating satellite which will simulate the force of gravity on the surface of Mars. To generate "artificial gravity" for the animals on board, the satellite will spin rapidly, making roughly one rotation every two seconds (34 rpm). The five-week mission will conduct the first in-depth study of how mammals adapt to a reduced-gravity environment. Groundbreaking data from this mission and its successors will be essential in determining future possibilities for human space exploration.

Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO). As the initial LIGO interferometers start to put new limits on gravitational wave signals, the LIGO Lab, the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, and international partners are proposing Advanced LIGO to improve the sensitivity by more than a factor of 10. This new detector, to be installed at the LIGO Observatories, will replace the present detector once it has reached its goal of a year of observation, and will transform gravitational wave science into a real observational tool. It is anticipated that this new instrument will see gravitational wave sources possibly as often as daily, with excellent signal strengths, allowing details of the waveforms to be read off and compared with theories of neutron stars, black holes, and other highly relativistic objects.

Plasmatron. A bus in Indiana is the latest laboratory for MIT's plasmatron reformer, a small device developers believe could significantly cut the nation's oil consumption as well as noxious emissions from a variety of vehicles. Researchers report that the plasmatron, used with an exhaust treatment catalyst on a diesel engine bus, removed up to 90 percent of nitrogen oxides (NOx) - the primary components of smog - from the bus's emissions. The plasmatron reformer also cut in half the amount of fuel needed for the removal process. The Environmental Protection Agency plans to institute the new limits by 2007.

Quantum Dot Optics. MIT researchers have combined organic materials with high-performing inorganic nanocrystals to create a hybrid optoelectronic structure - a quantum dot-organic light - emitting device (QD-OLED) that may one day replace liquid crystal displays (LCDs) as the flat-panel display of choice for consumer electronics. The work, reported in Nature, is a collaborative effort between Moungi Bawendi, professor of chemistry, and Vladimir Bulovic, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science, working through MIT's Center for Materials Science and Engineering.

New Optical Fiber. MIT researchers have created a low-loss optical fiber that may lead to advances in medicine, manufacturing, sensor technology, and telecommunications. Scientists and members of MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics and Center for Materials Science and Engineering developed the photonic bandgap fiber, which has a hollow core surrounded by a highly confining reflective surface dubbed "the perfect mirror" when MIT researchers invented it in 1998. The fiber conducts an intense stream of laser light that would melt traditional fiber-making materials. "Due to the efficient confinement of light in the hollow core, enabled by the mirror surface, we are able to utilize materials that would normally be damaged under such intense illumination conditions," said team leader Yoel Fink, assistant professor of materials science and engineering.