Trans woman killed by brother, perpetrator flees country

Dilan Sirwan

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - It was on Monday afternoon when Duhok police received a call informing them of the location of the body of a trans woman, murdered by her brother three days previously. By the time the police arrived at the corpse, the killer had long left the country. Another person had fallen victim to honor killing.

The call to the police came from a man who identified himself as the victim’s brother, explaining that another brother had killed his trans sister and left her body in the village of Mangesh, around 20 kilometers north of Duhok city center.

When police forces arrived at the scene of the crime at around 3:00 pm, they found the body of 23-year-old Doski Azad, a transgender woman, shot twice in the head and the chest.

The tragedy began for Doski when her long-gone brother Chakdar Azad returned to the Kurdistan Region over two weeks ago.

For Doski, who had left her family home over five years ago, her brother’s arrival in Duhok would have felt the same as the numerous threats she had received from her family over the years.

“She left the house five to six years ago, I had not seen her ever since,” Doski’s uncle Dlovan Sadiq told Rudaw English on Tuesday. “Doski made a mistake.”

Living in Duhok as a transgender woman was not easy for Doski. While she had established her own life over the years, working in a salon at Duhok’s Masike neighborhood and living her life as a woman, threats came thick and fast from her family.

“She was threatened multiple times, not just by her instant family but also distant relatives from their tribe,” a friend of Doski, who spoke to Rudaw English on the condition of anonymity, said. “She told me that her father had taken her ID and passport, but she seemed to have received it back because she spent New Year’s in Dubai.”

Doski had previously tried to consult with the police about filing lawsuits, a Duhok security source told Rudaw English, adding that during the times she had visited the station, police advised her to leave the city for her safety.

Doski was shot dead by her brother Chakdar on Friday, Doski’s family told Duhok’s police, although they called the police only after the killer had escaped from the Kurdistan Region.

An informed source told Rudaw English on Wednesday that Chakdar had left the country on Sunday, and to avoid clear tracking, he had not traveled through the Kurdistan Region’s airports, but rather drove north to Turkey.

Family and honor are two of the main pillars of Kurdish society. Any damage to a family’s reputation can see a member disowned for the sake of honor, or even killed. To many, a failure to marry and have children disrupts the social order. To be of any sexual orientation other than straight can not only put that person’s life in danger, but damage a family’s reputation.  

The stigma can be passed to their siblings or other relatives, adding even more pressure on people who already have a lot to lose by going public with their sexuality.

RELATED: Queer in Kurdistan: LGBT+ community weighed down by societal pressure

Doski’s killing has been slammed by several activists and diplomatic missions over the past two days.

“To say that the LGBT+ community was appalled by this heinous crime is an understatement. We are extremely alarmed by the continuous human rights violations against the LGBT+ community in the region,” Netherlands-based Kurdish LGBT+ activist and founder of Yeksani, an LGBT+ rights group, Zhiar Ali told Rudaw English on Wednesday.

“We are now demanding the government to take action, and creating more pressure than ever before. We have as much right as everybody else to live here in peace,” he added.

This is not the first time a transgender person has been killed for the sake of honor in the Kurdistan Region. 

The mother of transgender person in July told Rudaw that she was afraid that her husband and son had killed her child.

Members of the LGBT+ community in Iraq and the Kurdistan Region are often persecuted by security forces and conservatives. They are subject to arrest, verbal abuse, and even murder.

A crackdown on LGBT+ people in Iraq in 2009 saw deaths that probably number "in the hundreds," a well-informed official at the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) told Human Rights Watch (HRW).

The murders were widely believed to have been conducted by Iran-backed militias. Amir Ashour, founder of IraQueer, said that data collected by his LGBT+ rights organization found there to be 220 LGBT+ killings in Iraq in the year 2017 alone - including in the Kurdistan Region, which officials tout as a haven for diversity and coexistence.

Diplomatic missions in the Kurdistan Region also expressed their condemnation of Doski’s murder.

French Consul General in Erbil Olivier Decottignies took to Twitter to say, “Human dignity shall be inviolable,” along with a picture of Doski.

The German Consulate in Erbil shared a similar sentiment.

With the killer on the loose, all that is left for many activists is to ask the government to take steps towards finding the killer. The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) is yet to release any statement regarding the case.

“We sincerely hope that this time around, the government will take solid steps to find the culprit and punish them before the courts,” Ali said.

Additional reporting by Shahyan Tahseen