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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings, Torture and Big Money |
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May 8th,
2007 - A Wave of Revenge Killers |
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The Horrific Stoning Death of a Yazidi Girl By Patrick Cockburn Counterpunch May 8, 2007 The stoning to death of a
teenage girl belonging to the Yazidi religious sect because she fell in love
with a Muslim man has led to a spiral of violence in northern Iraq in which
23 elderly factory workers have been shot dead and 800 Yazidi students forced
to flee their university in Mosul. The killings began with an
act of brutality horrific even by Iraqi standards. A 17-year-old girl called
Doaa Aswad Dekhil from the town of Bashika in the northern province of
Nineveh converted to Islam. She belonged to the Yazidi religion, a mixture of
Islam, Judaism and Christianity as well as Zoroastrian and Gnostic beliefs.
The 350,000-strong Kurdish- speaking Yazidi community is centred in the north
and east of Mosul and has often faced persecution in the past, being
denounced as "devil worshippers". On 7 April, Doaa returned
home after she had converted to Islam in order to marry a Sunni Muslim who
was also a Kurd. She had been told by a Sunni Muslim cleric that her family
had forgiven her for her elopement and conversion. Instead she was met in
Bashika by a large mob of 2,000 people led by members of her family. What happened next was
captured in a mobile phone video. It shows a dark-haired girl dressed in a
red track suit top and black underwear with blood streaming from her face. As
she tries to rise to her feet she is kicked and hit on the head with a
concrete block. Armed and uniformed police
stand by watching her being killed over several minutes. Many in the crowd
hold up their phone cameras to record the scene. Nobody tries to help her as
she is battered to death. The savagery of the lynching
led to threats of retaliation. This part of Nineveh, though outside the
jurisdiction of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), is strongly under
its influence. The murdered girl and her intended husband were Kurds. The
KRG's President, Massoud Barzani, held meetings with Yazidi leaders. Kurdish
officials in Mosul said at the time that they had the situation under
control. The KRG is now calling for an investigation into what happened,
though the central government in Baghdad has little authority in the north of
the country. Retaliation when it came was
savage. On 23 April a bus carrying back workers from a weaving factory in
Mosul to Bashika, which has a Christian as well as a Yazidi population, was
stopped by several cars filled with unidentified gunmen at about 2pm. They
asked the Christians to get off the bus, according to the police account.
They then took the bus to eastern Mosul city where they lined up the men,
mostly elderly, against a wall and shot them to death. The revenge killings led to
two days of demonstrations in Bashika. Sunni Muslims, also Kurds, feared
retaliation. Yazidis say that 204 members of their community have been killed
since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003. Some 800 Yazidi students at
Mosul university have since fled to Kurdish cities such as Dohuk where they
are safe. They say they were told to convert or die. Relations between all
religious communities in Iraq have deteriorated over the past four years. The
fall of Saddam Hussein led to a process in which the Shia, 60 per cent of the
population, replaced the previously dominant Sunni who are only 20 per cent.
The Sunni insurgency has always been sectarian and has killed Shia,
Christians and Yazidis as heretics. In the Baghdad district of Dora the
Christian community has been threatened in recent weeks and told to convert
to Islam, pay protection money or be killed. Many have fled. Sectarian war continues in
Baghdad. A bomb exploded in a market in the Shia district of Bayaa in west
Baghdad yesterday, killing 35 and wounding 80 people. "What did these
innocent people do to be killed by a car bomb?" shouted a witness.
"Where is the government? Where is security?" In practice, however,
it is impossible to protect the crowded streets of Baghdad from vehicles
packed with explosives. External link: http://www.counterpunch.org/patrick05082007.html |