BAGHDAD — The video is shaky, but the brutality is clear.
A slender, black-haired girl is dragged in a headlock through a braying mob of men. Within seconds, she is on the ground in a fetal position, covering her head with 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, a member of 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 Hanaa Edwar, a women's rights activist. "I think this story will be absolutely repeated again. I believe if security is not controlled, such stories will be very common."
But the case has far broader dimensions in Iraq, where anger arising from it points to the ethnic and religious discord that colors virtually every issue here — even the slaying of a teenage girl.
That anger has been fueled by the video images, made with someone's cellphone, that appeared on the Internet and that over the weekend were the focus of a report on CNN.
And here is the CNN video of this young woman's stoning. From YouTube:
A look further into the LA Times story reveals this:
In a report released last month, the United Nations said so-called honor killings of women were on the rise in Iraq. In January and February, according to the report, at least 40 women had been killed for alleged "immoral conduct," such as sitting in a car with a man who is not a relative or having an adulterous relationship.
Unlike Duaa's death, none was known to have caused revenge attacks, much less political sniping.
Two weeks after the April 7 stoning, gunmen dragged more than 20 Yazidi men off a bus in the northern city of Mosul, about 20 miles south of Bashiqa, lined them up against a wall and executed them. 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.
Is this the democracy we're fighting for in Iraq?
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