ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — A Syrian refugee girl who was sent into a coma after being hit by a stray bullet from celebratory Newroz gunfire passed away on Wednesday, her father told Rudaw. After almost three days in a coma, Ayjan Abdulmalik lost her life on Wednesday afternoon, her father Abdulmalik Hussein told Rudaw on Wednesday. “Her treatment was difficult here. The bullet has remained lodged in her skull because we did not have the devices needed to remove it. The left side of her brain had been weakened,” the teenager’s doctor Rubad Jameel told Rudaw. On Sunday evening, 15-year-old Ayjan was celebrating Newroz with her family when a stray bullet struck her in the head, sending her into a coma. Her family fled the Syrian civil war in 2012 and has stayed in Domiz refugee camp near Duhok for almost a decade, preferring the relative safety of the Kurdistan Region to their war-torn homeland. Large portions of the population of the Kurdistan Region every year ventures out into the mountains and resorts on the first day of Newroz to celebrate the arrival of spring, which signals the beginning of the Kurdish new year. Celebratory gunfire is often part of these festivities. Kurdish authorities have repeatedly pledged to crack down on the practice without much success. “I urge the authorities to put an end to the gunfire, which repeatedly happens every year. My daughter is injured today, but there will be another one tomorrow in another place,” said Hussein, Ayjan’s father after the incident. “Instead of going to the celebrations, we have come to the hospital.” Dozens of people are wounded by celebratory gunfire every year in the Kurdistan Region, occasionally fatally. This year's Newroz makes clear that the practice is not abating. Additional reporting by Sirwan Abbas
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