ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — Zina Majid was standing in front of her parents’ kitchen window in Shekhan, Nineveh province on Saturday when her life was cut short by a hail of bullets.
Around midnight, a group of armed men showered the house with bullets which pierced the iron bars protecting the windows, striking Zina as she did chores.
Her family say the incident was due to a land dispute with farmers from the same tribe.
“Our problem is over land. We’ve had this issue for three years,” Zina’s father Majid Mohammed told Rudaw’s Hunar Rashid.
“These are the bullets they killed my daughter with … are guns for enemies or for relatives?” he added.
“In the last meeting, I spent a whole day with them, but they didn’t come to an agreement,” Duhok Governor Ali Tatar told Rashid.
“We suggested they sit down to talk together in Shekhan, we sat down together but unfortunately they were not convinced.”
More than 30 people were arrested in connection with the incident.
“We have not received any [official] documents from Baghdad saying this is their land,” said farmer Shimal Aziz, claiming the farmers only shot in self-defense.
“They brought guns, we just defended ourselves. We answered them,” he told Rashid.
Gun violence is a widespread problem in the Kurdistan Region, with the government’s gun-control measures doing little to counter the violence used in tribal disputes and proliferation of weapons on the black market.
The Kurdistan Region is home to multiple black markets where different firearms can be bought, including sniper rifles and machine guns. Heavy machine guns are used during Newroz and other celebrations.
Celebratory gunfire in March killed 15-year-old Ayjan Abdulmalik in Duhok.
The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has struggled to bring gun ownership under control and decrease the number of privately-owned weapons.
In another recent incident, 21-year-old Zahra Jassim was shot dead by her spouse, armed with an AK-47, at her parents’ house earlier this month.
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