The killing of outstanding Iraqi girls’s rights activist Yanar Mohammed has fuelled an outpouring of grief and requires justice, with advocates from around the globe remembering Mohammed as a “brave” voice.
Mohammed, 66, was killed earlier this week after unidentified gunmen on a bike opened fireplace outdoors her house within the north of Iraq’s capital, Baghdad.
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“Regardless of being rushed to the hospital and makes an attempt to save lots of her life, she succumbed to her wounds,” the Organisation of Girls’s Freedom in Iraq, a gaggle that Mohammed co-founded, mentioned in a statement shared on social media.
“We on the Organisation for Girls’s Freedom in Iraq condemn within the strongest phrases this cowardly terrorist crime, which we think about a direct assault on the feminist wrestle and the values of freedom and equality.”
A number of worldwide rights teams additionally condemned Mohammed’s killing, with Amnesty International on Wednesday decrying the lethal assault as “brutal” and “a calculated assault to stifle human rights defenders, particularly these defending girls’s rights”.
The organisation, which mentioned Iraq’s Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al‑Sudani ordered an investigation into the killing, additionally known as on the Iraqi authorities to make sure the perpetrators are delivered to justice.
“Yanar Mohammed … devoted her life to defending girls’s rights,” Amnesty’s Iraq researcher, Razaw Salihy, mentioned in a press release. “The Iraqi authorities should cease this sample of focused assaults of their tracks, and take severely the sustained smear campaigns designed to discredit and endanger activists.”
Mohammed was considered one of Iraq’s most outstanding girls’s rights activists, working for the reason that early 2000s “to guard girls dealing with gender-based violence, together with home abuse, trafficking, and so-called ‘honour killings’”, Entrance Line Defenders mentioned.
Her work included the institution of secure homes, which sheltered a whole bunch of ladies experiencing exploitation and abuse.
In a 2022 interview with Al Jazeera, Mohammed described her organisation’s efforts to help Iraqi girls who survived violence by the hands of ISIS (ISIL), which had seized management of enormous swathes of the nation.
“Muslim-Arab girls who had been enslaved by ISIL and haven’t discovered a spot to return to, they’re nonetheless dwelling within the shadows of the society,” she mentioned on the time.
“Not lower than 10,000 girls had been the victims of ISIL assault[s], and this femicide will not be actually acknowledged by the worldwide group or handled in a method that retains the dignity or the respect [of], or compensates, those that had been the victims.”
Years of threats
Mohammed had been the goal of dying threats for many years, “geared toward dissuading her from defending girls’s rights”, Front Line Defenders said. “But she remained defiant within the face of threats from ISIS and different armed teams.”
In 2016, she was awarded the Rafto Prize “for her tireless work for girls’s rights in Iraq beneath extraordinarily difficult circumstances”.
The Rafto Basis, the Norway-based nonprofit group that administers the award, mentioned it was “deeply shaken” by her killing. “We’re deeply shocked by this brutal assault on one of the crucial brave human rights defenders of our time,” the inspiration mentioned in a statement.
“The assassination represents not solely an assault on Yanar Mohammed as an individual, but additionally on the elemental values she devoted her life to defending: girls’s freedom, democracy, and common human rights.”
Different activists and human rights teams additionally paid tribute to Mohammed this week, with Human Rights Watch describing her as “considered one of Iraq’s most brave advocates for girls’s rights” for greater than twenty years.
“Yanar was a pricey colleague and pal to so many people within the girls’s rights and feminist group, considered one of our icons. She spent her life standing up for girls’s rights in probably the most harmful atmosphere,” said Agnes Callamard, secretary-general of Amnesty Worldwide.
“She confronted fixed threats, however she by no means stopped. And at present we cry and mourn her power, her dedication, her profound humanity, her superb braveness.”
