PAGEANT WINNER FLEES VIOLENCE
Killings, threats target prominent Iraqi women
BAGHDAD • A former Miss Iraq beauty queen has fled the country following a spate of killings of high-profile women.
Shimaa Qasim Abdulrahman said she left for Jordan after receiving death threats from a man purporting to be an Islamic State member who told her, “You’re next”.
“I was threatened with murder. My life was in danger. The killing of this many people scared me,” she told local Kurdish news site Rudaw. “I wasn’t comfortable living there anymore and that is why I left Iraq and came to Jordan.”
Her fleeing the country came just a week after fellow Iraqi beauty queen and social media star Tara Fares was shot dead in Baghdad on September 27. The 22-year-old was driving her Porsche when an assassin approached the car and shot her three times.
In the weeks before that, Suad al-Ali, a women’s rights activist in the southern city of Basra, was also gunned down as she walked to her car.
Dr. Rafeef al-Yassiri, a plastic surgeon dubbed “Iraq’s Barbie,” also died under mysterious circumstances. Authorities initially called her death a drug overdose but have not offered an update in over a month, leading to rumours she might have been poisoned. Al-Yassiri, a Shiite Muslim with a prominent social media presence, ran the Barbie medical centre, which offered cosmetic surgery as well as treatment for war victims and those with birth defects.
She posted photos of herself in full makeup and fashionable clothes, promoting her latest projects to more than one million Instagram followers.
A week after that, Rasha al-Hassan, the owner of a well-known beauty centre in Baghdad, was found dead in her home.
It is not clear whether the deaths are connected, however they have followed a pattern of targeting women promoting female empowerment and tend to fall on a Thursday.
The violence has shocked Iraq, raising fears of a return to the kind of attacks on prominent figures that plagued the country at the height of its sectarian strife.
Iraq is still recovering from its bloody fight against Islamic State terrorists. The country has been without a government since national elections in May, and riots have repeatedly broken out in the south over the authorities’ failure to provide basic services.
“These harrowing crimes are worrying us,” said Iraqi human rights activist Hana Adwar. “There are groups that want to terrify society through the killing of popular women and activists ... and to tell other women to abandon their work and stay at home.”
On Monday, Iraqi Interior Minister Qasim al-Araji said Fares was murdered by extremists, but declined to name them.
“A security team was formed to arrest those involved in Fares’ murder,” Araji told his Facebook followers. He further vowed to “bring perpetrators of Fares’ murder to justice to be tried in front of the Iraqi people.”
Fares, with an Iraqi father and a Lebanese mother, first became famous in 2015 when she won an unofficial Baghdad beauty pageant organized by a social club. She has become a social media darling, with bold posts and photos of herself posing in elaborate makeup, tight jeans and blouses that showed off her tattoos.
“I’m not doing anything in the dark like many others; everything I do is in the broad daylight,” she wrote.
A YouTube channel drew more than 120,000 followers in addition to her 2.8 million Instagram followers.
Fares spoke out occasionally against religious, tribal and political leaders.
In one of her videos, Fares chastised a Shiite cleric who she said had sought a temporary marriage with her, a tradition in Shiite communities that critics compare to prostitution.
“I’m not afraid of the one who denies the existence of God, but I’m really afraid of the one who kills and chops off heads to prove the existence of God,” she wrote on Instagram in July.
Iraq once boasted a liberal society and progressive laws for women and the family, going back to the 1950s. Those gains were eroded after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, which toppled Saddam Hussein and led to the emergence of powerful religious parties and a rise in extremism.