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ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — Cigarette smoke hung in a crowded third-floor room, windows shut to block out the nighttime chill. At the back of the room sat Zorab, a man in his early sixties, his eyes bloodshot with rage.
It was the early 2000s, and global chatter of an invasion of Iraq was growing louder. But for the tribe’s worth of men summoned to that room in a town in the Kurdistan Region, the most pressing issue was not the downfall of Saddam Hussein, but how to resolve the dishonour that Shehriban, Zorab's 16-year-old daughter, had brought upon her entire extended family.
"Let me tell you something that you all know already. You know that my daughter has gone, and I haven’t been able to sleep since the day she left," Zorab said as everyone listened close, nodding in acknowledgement. "It’s unbearable."
Among the young men smoking at the room’s threshold was Zafar, who had accompanied his father to the meeting. Now in his early forties, he remembered his cousin Shehriban with fondness. “She was exemplary in terms of morals and conduct, renowned among the extended family," Zafar told Rudaw English with a smile. "If you had gotten to know her, you would have known that she was a very honest person."
Zorab did not live by the rules of a conservative society. He was not religious, he smoked cigarettes, he gambled. But it turned out that there would be nobody more scrupulous when it came to meting out tribal justice.
Shehriban's mother had died a few years back. Her father had decided that while her brothers worked in the bazaar, she was to stay at home and wait until someone asked for her hand. Instead, she had fallen for a much older married man, Safa, and eloped with him. The couple had vanished without a trace.
Safa already had a wife and a child. His family had been left distraught by the whole affair, and they knew that anything could happen to him. After all, this was not just an issue between two families, but two powerful tribes. The weight of resolution fell by and large on the girl's family, and it was not unheard of for the family of a girl in a situation like this to attack the family of the man.
Shehriban had made Zorab the talk of his neighbourhood, shamed by pointing fingers. He’d had enough.
"Whoever is with me, let them sit; whoever isn’t, the door is open. Let them leave,” Zorab told the crowd, though some relatives had already expressed their disapproval by not turning up to the meeting in the first place.
"We're with you," came the choral reply.
The bloodthirsty pack decided to set up small search teams and look for the couple on the run.
While the men plotted Shehriban’s downfall, the women of the family, barred entry to the meeting, were mourning the inevitable outcome. "They were certain that she would be killed, and they knew there was no room for negotiation," Zafar remembered of the time.
The men were split into small groups, tasked with searching far and wide for the couple.
"We’ve taken precautions with the government too," Zorab reassured the men. "We’ve given her name and photo to all the police and Asayesh (internal security) stations. It’s ok if they find her, they won't be able to keep her in prisons forever." If state forces were to fail to find her, Zorab said they would "rise to the task". Everyone in attendance knew what that meant.
Such strict adherence to patriarchal, tribal justice can be found across the Kurdistan Region. Tribes had grown powerful in the aftermath of the 1991 Kurdish uprising against the regime of Saddam Hussein, and the use of heavy-handed tribal justice was overlooked by the ruling parties – the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). Each of the parties relied on tribes for their military pursuit of the other, making tribal leaders key players in their conflict.
During the Kurdish struggle in the 1960s to 1990s, when the Kurdish peshmerga, masters of the mountains, were defending Kurdish honour. But memoirs by several of these fighters mentioned the killing of women and men for honour by other peshmerga.
"Terrible things went on, of which the most notable were shame killing, perpetrated in the name of 'honour',” historian of Kurds David McDowall wrote, “but clearly themselves shameful acts motivated by shame, by husbands, brothers and fathers."
The PUK enacted a law in 2000 criminalising the honor-based violence in the territory it administered, with the KDP enacting similar law in 2002, according to McDowall. But when it came to enforcement, both the KDP and PUK authorities fell short of their responsibilities.
“While the scale of honour killings is unknown due to severe underreporting, the latest estimate indicates that several hundreds of girls and women become victims of honour killings in Iraq each year,” a report presented to the United Nations’ Human Rights Council in the summer of 2018 by the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions after her mission to Iraq read.
“Iraq lacks proper legislation to prevent and punish honour killings. Article 409 Penal Code permits “honour” as mitigation for crimes of violence committed against family members.” Changes in Iraqi legislation in the near future looks unlikely, as Iraqi parliamentary efforts to pass a draft law against domestic violence have stalled throughout 2019 and 2020.
Though the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) passed a law in 2004 prohibiting mitigating sentences for perpetrators of honour crimes, and enacted a separate piece of legislation, honour-based crimes against women and girls continue, raising questions about the effectiveness and enforcement of such laws. In the latest example, a 26-year-old woman was found hanged in the city of Kalar on November 20. Police arrested four men, including three of the woman’s brothers, for a suspected honour killing.
One last proposal was tabled before the end of the meeting Zorab was chairing.
"We’re with you. If you want, we can send a group of young men to attack the family house of the man or kill one of his brothers," another relative in attendance suggested.
"Let’s not blow the problem out of proportion. We’ve spoken to the man’s father and settled everything," said Nasralddin, Shehriban's older brother.
"What do you mean?" one relative inquired.
"We told them [the man's family] that if we find them, we would kill them both, and if they [the man's family] find them then they could kill them both," Nasralddin replied, telling the meeting's attendees that there were witnesses to the agreement between the two families that would leave the issue done and dusted.
Ten long days passed before Zafar and his father received a call to attend another family gathering.
"You’re all exhausted. Let me give you a piece of good news that means you won’t have to think about the issue anymore," a grinning Zorab told the men. "I’m going to sleep very well tonight… understand what I’m trying to tell you.”
It was as though a weight in the room had been lifted. Tea was served, jokes were cracked, and laughter shot through with bass filled the room. Zafar wondered why the men were laughing in such a low pitch.
"Their laughter was to tell any neighbours who heard it that their honour had been cleansed, that their heads were now being held high,” Zafar realised later.
No one knew exactly what had happened to the girl, but they did know that the 'honourable' men of the family had killed her. While every woman in the family stood silent due to fear of the honourable men, a few stories on the fate of the girl had spread among the women of the family. Shehriban had been thrown off a cliff then fed on by stray dogs, according to one tale; in another, she drowned after being thrown into a river.
Whatever the method, Shehriban had been killed by her own family. Zafar's mother was so outraged and grief stricken that she never allowed Shehriban's father Zorab into her house again.
The mystery of what exactly happened to Shehriban would eat away at Zafar for more than a decade, until the opportunity arose in 2013 for him to sit down in a teahouse with Nasralddin, the older brother who had reassured of the couple’s agreed-upon murder.
"Do you want the details, cousin?" Nasralddin asked Zafar. "Yes," Zafar said.
"Then let's sit down, because it’s a long story.”
After the first meeting in the smoke-filled room, the men of the family, young and old, embarked on the search for the girl, armed with AK-47s and pistols. They combed through nearby towns and villages in search of her, but to no avail.
Then one day, they received a tip from one of Safa’s family members that Shehriban had gone to a city under the control of Saddam Hussein’s central government, to live with one of his relatives.
In further scheming, the family had to devise a plan to trick the couple to return to their hometown. They found Safa’s cousin Mohammed, with whom he had a good relationship. The cousin was pressured with verbal threats into helping the family entice Safa home.
At the time, economic hardship had forced tens of thousands of Kurds in Iraq to head to Europe. In response, a forged passport market blossomed in the Kurdistan Region. Mohammed told Safa he had managed to obtain two passports with Turkish visas. Take the passports and head to Europe via Turkey, Mohammed told him, safe from the hunt for Shehriban. Safa agreed. Mohammed arranged to meet the couple somewhere remote, just within the confines of Kurdish territory.
At just before 12 pm on the appointed day, Nasralddin, two of his younger brothers, and a close relative hid behind a boulder. One of the younger brothers was armed with a pistol; they’d agreed among themselves not to bring an AK-47 this time, the sound of its fire too loud not to grab attention. Without telling the others, Nasralddin had brought a pistol with him too – just in case.
Mohammad stood in the middle of the road, waiting for Safa and Shehriban. The couple disembarked, and Mohammad began chatting with Safa, Shehriban silent beside him.
Behind the boulder, the younger brother pulled out his pistol, but the older relative took the gun and four men ran out onto the road from their hiding place.
"The girl immediately realised what was happening, and the colour of her face changed," Nasralddin recollected to Zafar.
The older man hesitated, and Safa, who had his wits about him, tried to talk sense to the man holding the gun. In the meantime, Nasralddin took out the pistol he had brought with him and shot the man in the head from ten yards. One bullet to the man and he collapsed.
Shehriban’s younger brother took her hand and dragged her along the asphalt. "Brother, we haven't done anything wrong,” she kept saying, “we were married based on the sunnah of the Prophet" – the couple had officially been married in a city under central government control, in accordance with the rules of Islam. Regardless, the brother shot Shehriban in the head.
The men shrouded the married couple’s dead bodies with shrubbery and stones, and left.
"We were delirious and all over the place. It was the first time we’d committed murder, we were in distress and didn’t know what to do. We went to my father's house and said "Dad, we’re done, the issue was settled," Nasralddin recalled.
"My father told us, ‘throw your shoes away, change the brand of cigarette you smoke, burn and throw your clothes away, leave no sign of what you did. The guns – don't take them to the weapons bazaar, take them to a friend's house and don't touch them for another ten years’.”
That night, the father called up the relatives to announce the mission had been accomplished.
The family had a connection in the local Asayesh force, who did not bother the family except for a few visits to go through the motions of a formal investigation into Shehriban’s disappearance.
"It was routine. The Asayesh needed to do paperwork because they don't want to cause issues with the tribes," Nasralddin said. "If the authorities were serious, we would all have had to confess and we could all have been imprisoned."
The father was eventually called in to the Asayesh station to identify Shehriban’s corpse. Nasralddin cannot remember if his sister was buried by the municipality, but she was certainly not given a burial in the presence of family.
Zafar asked Nasralddin if he regretted what he did. "Of course... I wish I could go back to that day. I wouldn’t hit her with a pebble, let alone a bullet. I’m full of repentance, there isn’t a night when I don't think about her."
"That scene still plays out in my head every night before I fall asleep, I see her begging on my feet screaming ‘Brother, brother, don't kill me!’.”
*Editor’s note: Almost twenty years on from the murder, Zafar spoke with regret for his participation in the initial meetings. Zafar said he wanted to raise awareness on the honour-based killings of girls and women by their relatives. Zafar told Rudaw English that he would only tell the story of Shehriban’s murder if names were changed and locations kept vague, to avoid restarting tribal conflict.
Editing by Shahla Omar
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