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Mulslim Honor Killing in Basra

Add comment May 21st, 2008

BASRA, Iraq (CNN) — The man, blindfolded and handcuffed, crouches in the corner of the detention center while an Iraqi soldier grills him about rampant crimes being carried out by gangs in the southern city of Basra.

Iraqi authorities say this man has confessed to killing 15 girls, including a 9 year old.

Women bore the brunt of the militias’ extremist ideologies. The militants spray-painted threats on walls across Basra, warning women to wear headscarves and not to wear make-up. Women were sometimes executed for the vague charge of doing something “un-Islamic.”

In the wasteland on the outskirts of Basra, dotted with rundown homes, the stench of death mixes with the sewage. Local residents told the Iraqi Army that executions often take place in the area, particularly for women, sometimes killed for something as seemingly inocuous as wearing jeans.
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Inside her rundown home, Sabriya’s watery eyes peer out from under her robe. She points to the first photo of one of her sons on the wall.

“This one was killed because he was drinking,” she says.

She draws her finger across her neck and gestures at the next photo.

“This one was slaughtered for his car.”

“This one the same,” she adds, looking at the third.

Her three sons, her daughter and her sister were all killed by the hard-line militia. Her sister was slaughtered because she was a single woman living alone.

“They said [to her], ‘Why don’t you have a husband?’ ” Sabriya says. “They came in at night and put a pillow on her face and shot her in the head.”

Sabriya lives on what was once dubbed “murder street” for the daily killings that happened there last year.

On the day CNN visited, dozens of young men sat where there used to be piles of bodies. Sheik Maktouf al-Maraiyani shudders at the memory.

“Every day, we would find 10 or 15 of our men killed,” he says, adding sorrowfully “one of them was my son.” His son was 25 years old.