Last month, the case of a young woman in a “family dispute” in which the community police had been asked to mediate ended badly when a 22-year-old Youtuber was killed by her father. He has reportedly admitted to strangling her in her sleep.

An outcry on social media followed, with many calling for the case to be treated as premeditated murder and not as a so-called honor crime.

“Iraq has failed to criminalize domestic violence despite an increase in reporting of incidents of domestic violence by national NGOs. Shockingly, the Iraqi penal code still treats leniently so-called 'honor crimes’ comprising violent acts such as assault and even murder. There is also no effective system in place for reporting domestic violence nor adequate shelters to protect women and girls,” Amnesty International noted earlier this month.

Iraq’s community police answer to the Interior Ministry and operate only in central government areas and not the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI). They are tasked with alleviating problems plaguing Iraqi society, such as domestic abuse, electronic blackmail, drug use and runaways, and they claim to be seen as more approachable by the population than other parts of the country’s security forces.

The case of Tiba al-Ali

The young woman killed on Jan. 31, Tiba al-Ali, had returned to Iraq for a visit but had been living independently in Turkey for years. She reportedly had complained of being sexually assaulted by her brother in previous years, which her family allegedly told her to “forget about.”

She appeared happy and carefree in several videos posted online from Turkey with her Syrian-born fiancé.

Iraqi YouTuber, Tiba al-Ali, was killed by her father who has confessed to the murder. Al-Ali was 22 years-old and had been living in Turkey, regularly making YouTube videos with her fiance. Her death sparked protests in the country over the lack of domestic violence laws.

In a December interview in Baghdad prior to her killing, Brig. Gen. Ghalib Atiyah, who has been at the helm of the community police for the last three years, told Al-Monitor that none of the women and girls whose cases the community police had been involved in, had been killed. He stressed that this should be seen as an accomplishment, given the influence that tribal norms continue to have on the country.

Of the 153 cases that Iraq’s community police dealt with regarding runaways in 2022, “not a single [woman or girl] was killed,” Atiyah said.

During our visit to his office, a printout was provided with the number of “family violence” cases the community police had dealt with in the previous year. It listed the number of “child runaways” as 32 and “young women runaways” as 153.

Al-Monitor was told that the “child” category refers to males under age 18, while “young women” refers to women and girls both under and over 18 but that “most of them are very young.” When this difference in categorization was pointed out, Brig. Gen. Atiyah stressed that many Westerners do not understand that “most Iraqi women live with their families until they are married.” Many of the runaway cases are related to young women who are “tricked” by men they meet online, he said, adding that the runaways “fall in love,” but they are then lied to by these men and want to go home but are too afraid to do so.

He said that through mediation with the families and regularly checking up on the young women who return to their homes, his force plays a key role in ensuring many of them do not end up doing desperate things to survive and that their families agree to let them come home without harming them.

A 2018 study by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime found that, at the global level, their homes are “the most dangerous place for women, with the majority of female homicide victims worldwide killed by partners or family.”

One female hotel employee in Baghdad claimed to Al-Monitor in a conversation in early February that, from what she has seen, it is often the families of young women who push them into prostitution in the Iraqi capital.

Absence of domestic violence law

Brig. Gen. Atiyah said the fact that Iraq does not have a law dealing specifically with domestic violence creates problems for the police as well.

“Sometimes we find a woman wandering alone in the streets at 2 a.m. [who has been beaten or left her home due to abuse of some sort], and we don’t have anywhere to put her. Sometimes she just stays with one of the female members of the force so that she will be safe, and this is a big responsibility,” he said.

When asked how many of the community police are women, he said “very, very few,” adding that he had in recent days asked the interior minister to hire more women, as they are desperately needed for the sort of work in which this part of the police engages.

In Iraq’s southeastern province of Maysan along the Iranian border, Al-Monitor was told in early January by one young man that he stopped speaking to a friend from university because this friend killed his own sister a few years ago after she “admitted to having been in previous contact with a man who had come to ask for her hand in marriage.”

“He took her to an area outside the city and killed her there,” he said.

"Everyone in this area knows about the case,” he said, adding that nothing was done because “all of her family pushed him to do that.”

Though he had previously been speaking about anti-government protests and was enthusiastic about attempts to change Iraqi society in other ways, he sees little hope in the future that the way women are treated will change.

“It’s just the way things are here, for now,” he said.

While the KRI does have a law against domestic violence, some cite flaws in its implementation.

In January, local media outlet Rudaw quoted Erbil police spokesperson Hogr Aziz as saying that a 13-year-old girl was “brutally tortured” before being murdered by her father in the KRI capital.

“The grieving mother says she has filed complaints, reached out to women’s rights organizations and called the Kurdistan Region’s domestic violence helpline, but her calls for help did not lead to any results,” Rudaw reported.

Discussing human rights violations against women remains a very sensitive matter across all of Iraq.

One women-led NGO contacted by Al-Monitor in the days following the latest killings declined to comment, saying it was “too risky for our ongoing operations” due to the “public backlash against NGOs” in the country amid media attention to the latest cases.

Al-Monitor

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