IRAQ:The brutal slaying of a 17-year-old girl for falling in love across the religious divide serves as a terrifying example of the intolerance poisoning the heart of Iraq, writes Tina Susmanin Baghdad
The video is shaky, but the brutality is clear. A slender, black-haired girl is dragged in a headlock through a baying mob of men. Within seconds, she is on the ground in a foetal position, covering her head in her arms in a futile attempt to fend off a shower of stones.
Someone slams a concrete block onto the back of her head. A river of blood oozes from beneath her long, tangled hair.
The girl stops moving, but the kicks and the rocks keep coming, as do the victorious shouts of the men delivering them.
In the eyes of many in her community in northern Iraq, 17-year-old Duaa Khalil Aswad's crime was to love a boy from another religion. She was a Yazidi, an insular religious sect, he was a Sunni Muslim. To Duaa's uncle and cousins, that was reason enough to put her to death last month in the village of Bashiqa.
Women's groups say the video shows Iraq's backward slide as religious and ethnic intolerance takes hold.
"There is a new Taliban controlling the lives of women in Iraq," said Hana Edwar, the leader of the Amal Organisation for Women, a non-governmental group in Baghdad. "I think this story will be absolutely repeated again. I believe if security is not controlled, such stories will be very common."
The case has far broader dimensions in Iraq, where anger arising from it points to the ethnic, religious and sectarian discord that colours virtually every issue here - even the slaying of a teenage girl.
That anger has been fuelled by release of the video images, made with someone's cellular phone, that appeared on the internet and that over the weekend were the focus of a report on CNN.
Kurds, who include Yazidis, suspect Sunni Arabs of circulating the gruesome images to fuel anger against Yazidis and undermine the Kurdish community, which exercises a degree of autonomy in northern Iraq and is seeking more.
"It seems they are trying to make it big for political purposes," said Mohsen Gargari, a Kurdish member of parliament.
In an interview, he and two other Kurdish lawmakers condemned Duaa's killing, but they noted that in February, a Sunni woman had been killed by relatives for having a relationship with a Yazidi man. "Nobody talked about it, nobody filmed it or turned it into a big issue," said Gargari.
In a report released last month, the United Nations said so-called "honour killings" of women were on the rise in Iraq. In January and February alone, according to the report, at least 40 women had been killed for alleged "immoral conduct". This can range from sitting in a car with a man who is not a relative to having an adulterous relationship.
Unlike Duaa's death, none of the killings was known to have caused revenge attacks, much less political sniping. Two weeks after the April 7th stoning, gunmen dragged more than 20 Yazidi men off a bus in the northern city of Mosul, about 30km (20 miles) south of Bashiqa, lined them up against a wall and gunned them down. The next day, a Sunni insurgent group linked to al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for a car bombing that targeted the offices of a Kurdish political party in northern Iraq, saying it was to avenge the death of Duaa.
"We are expecting more violence, but we already have paid the price," said Mahama Shangali, a Yazidi member of parliament.
Shangali said three of his cousins had been killed recently in Mosul, home to a large Yazidi community. Edan Ashaik, a Yazidi living in Mosul, said that in the past month, followers of the sect had been warned by Arabs to leave the city. Yazidi college students have fled the university in Mosul for fear of being attacked.
"I have to repeat my courses next year or go in disguise to take the exams," said Amal Jibor (23), a would-be university graduate who said she and her family had left Mosul and were living with relatives in a cramped house in Bashiqa.
Jibor said most Yazidis opposed the stoning to death, but she echoed the politicians' view that the case was being exploited. "It was an ordinary problem, but it was made use of and was fabricated into a political cause."
Shangali and many other Yazidis, as well as non-Yazidi Kurds, are convinced that the circulation of the video is part of a plot to drive a wedge into the Kurdish community of northern Iraq.
They say this would hamper the ability of Kurds to pass a referendum planned later this year on autonomy for some northern areas, including the city of Kirkuk and disputed lands bordering the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region.
Since Saddam's overthrow in April 2003, Kurds have begun returning to their home towns in the north, and Kurdish/ Arab tensions in the region have risen.
In the past month once-placid areas of the north have been experiencing car bombings and other violence, which Kurdish leaders blame on Sunni Arab insurgents loyal to al-Qaeda.
Yazidis say they have faced persecution under a succession of rulers, starting with the Ottomans and lasting through Saddam, because of their religious beliefs.
Yazidis are neither Christian nor Muslim and worship a blue peacock known as Malak Taus. Estimates of their population in Iraq range from about 350,000 to 500,000.
They are fiercely insular, opposing marriage to non-Yazidis and making it virtually impossible for non-Yazidis to convert to their religion. Shangali said this is part of their effort to preserve the tiny minority's purity, not to shut anyone out.