Stoned To Death For Converting To Islam

Video Of Iraqi Girl's Stoning Shown On Internet

By Abdulhamid Zebari
Sat May 5, 2007
8:32 AM ET
Yahoo

ARBIL, Iraq (AFP) - Cellphone videos have appeared on the Internet showing an Iraqi mob stoning and kicking to death a 17-year-old girl after she offended her minority community by eloping with a Muslim man.

Doaa Khalil Aswad was a member of northern Iraq's Yazidi religious sect but, according to local officials, she was murdered on April 7 by her brothers and uncles after she allegedly converted to Islam.

In the video -- on the Kurdish website Jebar.Info and rapidly spreading on the Internet -- Aswad is shown lying in the road as men kick her and throw a large lump of rock or concrete at her head.

Her face is drenched in blood but uniformed and armed officers of the Iraqi police stand by and do nothing to prevent the attack.

The slim, dark-haired girl is wearing a red tracksuit top and black underwear during the beating
At one point she struggles to sit up and cover herself, but a man kicks her in the face knocking her violently back to the ground.

The assault continues for several minutes and she does not appear to cry out nor resist her attackers.

Members of a large crowd can be seen filming the murder on their cellphones, some of them shouting or kicking out at the cowering victim.

Nobody Tries To Help Her.

"They brutally killed a young Yazidi girl in pursuit of out-of-date tribal rites," said Tahsin Saeed Ali, Emir of the Yazidis in Iraq and the world and head of the Supreme Yazidi Spiritual Council, in a statement.

Ali condemned the murder and called on Muslims not to retaliate. When news of Aswad's murder surfaced last month, it triggered an apparent revenge attack.

On April 23, gunmen stopped a bus carrying workers to her community, the village of Beshika 10 kilometres (six miles) outside Mosul, dragged out 23 Yazidis and shot them dead.

While it is a Kurdish speaking area, Beshika lies outside northern Iraq's Kurdish autonomous region, whose administration has urged the national government in Baghdad to carry out an investigation into the murder.

Last week the United Nations quarterly report on human rights in Iraq expressed serious concern over a rapid rise in so-called "honour killings" of women deemed to have betrayed their families in Kurdish Iraq.

"The killing of Doaa is a great tragedy for her family and the Kurdish community. It is a crime and religiously, socially and ideologically unacceptable," a statement from the Kurdish authority said

"While we condemn this crime, we demand that it be not used in arousing sedition among the components of the Kurdish people.

Yazidis -- who number some 500,000, mainly in northern Iraq -- speak a dialect of Kurdish but follow a pre-Islamic religion and have their own cultural traditions.

They believe in God the creator and respect the Biblical and Koranic prophets, especially Abraham, but their main focus of worship is Malak Taus, the chief of the archangels, often represented by a peacock.

Followers of other religions know this angel as Lucifer or Satan, leading to popular prejudice that the secretive Yazidis are devil-worshippers.

Nevertheless, the community has survived for centuries alongside its Muslim and Christian neighbours.

Now, however, with sectarian war gripping much of Iraq, Sunni Muslim extremists have begun to threaten them.

Note: The following video of Doaa's stoning, has been added by me, and was not part of the AFP/Yahoo report.

WARNING: Video Contains Highly Graphip & Disturbing Scenes. Viewer Discretion Is Absolutely Advise...Should Be Seen By A Mature Audience!!!