Mourners gather in Iraqi Kurdistan to bury activist killed in Paris attack
Mourners gathered on Thursday in Iraqi Kurdistan for the politically charged funeral of activist Emine Kara, one of three Kurds killed in a December attack in Paris.
Members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has been waging a decadeslong insurgency against Turkey, were among the dozens at the procession in Sulaimaniyah, a correspondent said.
Kara, a veteran of the fight against the Daesh group according to relatives, and a leader of the Movement of Kurdish Women in France which has ties to the PKK, was shot dead on December 23 along with Abdurrahman Kizil and Mir Perwer. A xenophobic gunman, William Malet, has been charged over the attack in the French capital’s 10th district, home to a large Kurdish population, which also wounded three others and fomented fear in the community.
Kara’s coffin was flown into Sulaimaniyah, the second-largest city of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region, and arrived early Thursday, two days after a procession in Paris.
According to a correspondent, it was brought to the Iraqi Kurdish city’s Hajj Sur mosque and draped in a flag of the PKK, a group categorised by Turkey and its Western allies as a “terrorist” organisation.
The crowd chanted slogans glorifying “the martyr Evin Goyi” — Kara’s nom de guerre — and some were waving flags with the portrait of imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, said the correspondent.
Kara’s relatives said she would be buried later on Thursday in the Qandil mountains, a region north of Sulaimaniyah near the Iranian border, where the PKK has rear bases often targeted by Turkish raids.
She travelled to France in 2020 for medical treatment after fighting the Daesh militant group in northern Syria, her brother, Ismail Al Hajj, said at the funeral.
Kara had lived in France since then even as her claim for political asylum was rejected. She “fought against Daesh in northern Syria for five years and was wounded in the back during our battles in Kobane”, Hajj said.