Dishonorable

Via Bryan: Du'a Khalil Aswad was a a lovely 17-years-old Iraq woman of the Yazidi sect faith. She was beaten and stoned to death because she was romanticly involved with a man who was a Sunni Muslim. Three police officers watched as Aswad was murdered. Her male attackers believed this was an honor killing. She was beaten for 30 minutes. There is nothing honorable about murdering a defenseness woman. The level of sickness is these men filming Aswad's murder on phone cameras.

Al Jazeera reports three men have been arrested. The police may have delivered Aswad to her killers.

They ran away together to an address in Bashika. The girl's family alerted the police and Du'a and her boyfriend were found just a few days later.

According to Ms Nammi, who is calling for the girl's killers to be brought to justice, Du'a was arrested and put into prison.

A few days later, the police apparently received assurances from the leader of her tribe - who Ms Nammi believes is Du'a's uncle - that the girl would not be harmed.

But the police were present during Aswad's murder. The stories become conflicted. No one is going to take responsibility for an international human rights scandal.

On the video, Du'a's screams can be heard as she is dragged to the ground. In a further humiliation, her lower body has been stripped.

Instinctively, Du'a tries to cover herself; only later was a piece of clothing thrown over her.

She is surrounded by an enormous crowd jockeying for a good view of the ritualistic killing. About nine men take part in the attack, including, it is thought, members of the girl's family.

To any father of a daughter, that a helpless girl should be set upon with such cowardly savagery is beyond comprehension. One can barely imagine her terror.

It is a profoundly disturbing spectacle. One man kicks her hard between the legs as she screams in agony. Du'a tries to lift herself up, but someone hurls a concrete block into her face.

Another man stamps on her face. Someone kicks her in the stomach. Police officers stand idly by, some of them apparently enjoying the spectacle as much as anyone else.

Muslim feminist Yanar Mohammed and Dr. Sima Samar speak to Democracy Now about the murder.

YANAR MOHAMMED: Well, you just said it. Honor killing is becoming something to celebrate in Iraq now, and this did not happen before the last years that we experienced in the post-war Iraq. When a young woman is killed -- actually, it was more than eight to nine males around her. It was hundreds of males standing around. None of them helped, but they were very keen on photographing the scene, on videotaping it on their cell phones, on their mobile phones. And on top of that, the part, the information that’s missing in the report is that some of our codes, the penal codes, which is part of our laws, they support the killing of women if they are “dishonorable.”

So what happened in this new Iraq, the so-called liberation of Iraq has turned women into refugees inside their country. Millions of us are vulnerable to be killed, and all our lives are threatened, and there is nobody to secure our lives for us. The policemen were standing and watching, and actually they helped to get the young girl back to the place where she was killed. So by constitution, we have lost our rights. Honor killings are on the rise. Kidnappings of women are getting more now. Our organization’s work proves that human trafficking is still rising, and not much is being done about it.

And when you look at the situation, it’s as if the country was occupied and later on handed down to the extremists who were responsible of the 9/11. Why are all the TV outlets given to Islamists? Where are the democrats? Why aren’t they being supported? Where are the seculars? Why are the women's groups not being supported? And we are one example of those. It is as if it was a plan to make us weaker -- the women, the freedom-loving people of Iraq -- and to support the extremists, to give them, to hand the government over to them.

Iraq is not getting better. The country is a lawless land. The Los Angeles Times reports Iraq is helping fund al-Qaeda.

In one of the most troubling trends, U.S. officials said that Al Qaeda's command base in Pakistan is increasingly being funded by cash coming out of Iraq, where the terrorist network's operatives are raising substantial sums from donations to the anti-American insurgency as well as kidnappings of wealthy Iraqis and other criminal activity.

The influx of money has bolstered Al Qaeda's leadership ranks at a time when the core command is regrouping and reasserting influence over its far-flung network. The trend also signals a reversal in the traditional flow of Al Qaeda funds, with the network's leadership surviving to a large extent on money coming in from its most profitable franchise, rather than distributing funds from headquarters to distant cells.

Al Qaeda was financially broke. The chaos in Iraq changed that.

"Iraq is a big moneymaker for them," said a senior U.S. counter-terrorism official.

The Bush administration's policy has turned Iraq into an Islamic extremist paradise.

Update: Iraqi woman protested the murder in Arbil.

Here is a much more graphic video. The site also has porn ads. Viewer discretion advised.