Kurdish Women dying in Iraq

Why are a growing number of young women in this relatively safe
corner of Iraq showing up in local hospitals, dying of suspicious burns?





Sept. 18, 2007 - The doctor knows, just from glancing at the burns,
that someone is lying to him. Srood Tawfiq, a reconstructive surgeon at
Sulaimaniya Hospital in Iraq's northern Kurdish region, buttons his
white lab coat and steps into the burn unit. "Busy day yesterday," he
says, pulling back a curtain to reveal a sleeping 16-year-old girl with
kerosene burns over 90 percent of her body. The mother of the young
woman, hovering over the hospital bed, tells Tawfiq that her daughter
slipped and scalded herself while carrying a portable stove. The doctor
listens sympathetically. But later, out of the woman's earshot, he
explains that he doubts the mother's explanation. If it were really an
accident, he whispers, "you don't get this degree of burn." Outside the
hospital room he pulls off his hygienic mask and shakes his head. "We
never tell them that they're going to die," he says quietly.

Kurdistan
has long been considered the one consistently safe and relatively
prosperous region of Iraq. So why, in increasing numbers, are the
territory's young women showing up at local hospitals dying of
suspicious burns? According to the Women's Union of Kurdistan, there
were 95 such cases in the first six months of 2007, up 15 percent since
last year. A December 2006 report from the Asuda women’s rights group
in Sulaimaniya says that the "phenomenon is increasing at an alarming
rate." Ninety-five percent of the victims are under 30, and roughly
half are between 16 and 21. On the day before I stopped by the
emergency hospital in Sulaimaniya, six young women were admitted with
major burns, three of them telling suspicious stories. When I called
Zryan Yones, the Kurdish health minister, he said that the trend among
young women is more disturbing than a recent outbreak of cholera. He
provided a startling statistic: since August 10, Kurdistan had had nine
deaths from its cholera epidemic; in the same period, there were 25
young women dead of burns. "I have one young girl lying in our morgues
every single day," he told me.

So what's going on? Most of
the survivors tell doctors that the burns resulted from a "cooking
accident." But surgeons told me they can tell that the vast majority
are not telling the truth. Kerosene, the fuel used to cook here, is not
particularly volatile; if a woman comes in with burns over the majority
of her body, it is likely intentional. Women's rights advocates in
Sulaimaniya believe that the majority of the burn cases are suicide
attempts; the remainder are suspected to be honor killings or other
murders disguised as accidents or suicide. ("Cooking accident" has long
been a euphemism for dowry killing in India.) Doctors told me that it's
virtually impossible to distinguish between murder and suicide based on
the burns and the women's stories. Still, anecdotal evidence suggests
that the trend may be aggravated by a copycat effect among Kurdistan's
teenagers. One 20-year-old woman, Heshw Mohammad, who briefly
considered burning herself after her father killed her boyfriend two
years ago, told me that self-immolation has become a sort of fashion
among teenage Kurdish women. "They imitate each other," she says.

What's
the motive—and why fire? Doctors, rights advocates, and young women I
spoke to described a collision of local tradition with modern
technology and the fallout from the Iraq war. Death by immolation has a
long history among ethnic Kurds. When someone is angry here, a popular
interjection is "I'm going to burn myself!" Locals I talked to
attributed the fire obsession to various local cultural sources. The
Zoroastrian religion uses fire as a prominent symbol. The Kurdish new
year, called "Nawroz," commemorates the day a folk hero named Kawa
killed a tyrant named Zohak and then set a fire on a mountaintop to
tell his followers; Kurds celebrate the day by burning tires and with
other pyrotechnic displays. "Burning, traditionally, has been the way
to die among the Kurdish people," says Yones, the health minister.
Most of the burn cases in Kurdistan—whether suicides or honor
killings—revolve around love and dating. Heshw Mohammad's case is
typical. When she was 18 she fell in love with a local boy, and the two
started seeing each other, which is generally frowned on in Kurdistan's
traditional society. They communicated secretly by text message on
their mobile phones to arrange meetings. But her father had other ideas
about his daughter's future; he had already promised her to one of his
friends. When Heshw's boyfriend asked her father to let the girl marry
him, her father gunned the boy down with an AK-47, she says. She later
attempted suicide by overdosing on medication, but she acknowledges
that burning herself "crossed my mind." After the killing, her
boyfriend's father took her to a women's shelter in Sulaimaniya, where
she now says she sleeps late and spends her time watching South Korean
soap operas on satellite TV. "I have no plans for the future," she told
me. "I'm quite sure I will be killed in the end."

Rights
advocates explain that the introduction in the past several years of
inexpensive mobile phones and e-mail to Kurdistan have made dating and
casual sex easier, even as the old patriarchal social structures remain
in place. "The explosion of technology has alienated people from
themselves," says Samera Mohammad of the Rassan women's rights center
in Sulaimaniya. She says that a disturbing number of the suicides
involve boys who take pictures of their girlfriends with their camera
phones and then show their friends. But rights advocates say that even
something as simple as bad grades can be a motive for self-immolation.

The
Iraq war only made things worse. Refugees from Iraq's cities, some of
whom have turned to prostitution to earn a living, have flocked to
Kurdistan from elsewhere in the country, challenging rural sexual mores
and the religious beliefs of the mostly Sunni Muslim Kurds. Kurdistan's
lakeside resorts are said to be a popular destination for sex workers
in search of easy income. "With the arrival of prostitutes, men have
become more suspicious of their daughters," says Paiman Izzedine of the
Women's Union of Kurdistan. Economic factors have also aggravated the
problem, according to locals. The price of kerosene, for example, has
tripled since the war began, its price swinging wildly, black-market
dealers told me. That means households now stockpile the fuel for the
winter in large quantities when they can get it cheap—providing young
women with inspiration and an easy weapon.

For now, the
suicides are a phenomenon that is seldom discussed openly in Kurdistan.
Srood Tawfiq, the surgeon at Sulaimaniya's burn center, says he has
seen only five or six cases in which the patients admitted to a suicide
attempt. Rights advocates told me that they're beginning to hold
conferences in local villages to educate teachers and other community
leaders about the problem. Yet even Tawfiq acknowledges that he doesn't
press his patients too hard about their real motivations. "We don't
insist on the cause," he told me, as we talked outside the burn unit.
"We just ask once; we don't push it." Even in relatively peaceful
Kurdistan, sometimes the truth is too merciless to speak.