Iraqi activists demonstrated in Baghdad on Sunday to demand a law against domestic violence, a few days after the death of a young YouTuber strangled by her father, a tragedy that caused a stir in a largely conservative country.
Tiba al-Ali was killed in late January in the province of Diwaniya (south), the Interior Ministry announced on Friday, reporting an attempt to mediate between the 22-year-old young woman and her relatives to resolve a “family dispute” . The father surrendered to the police and confessed to the murder of his daughter.
Prevented Sunday by the security forces from approaching the Supreme Council of the Judiciary, around twenty activists nevertheless gathered on an avenue leading to the building, noted a journalist from Agence France-Presse (AFP).
“Stop killing women”, “We demand that Tiba’s murderer be held accountable”, could be read on some signs.
“We are calling for laws to protect women, including a law against domestic violence,” 22-year-old protester Rose Hamid told AFP. “We came to protest against the murder of Tiba and all the others before her. Who will be the next victim ? “.
“We will continue our mobilization, due to an increase in domestic violence and feminicides”, lambasted the demonstrator Lina Ali.
On the sidelines of the rally, Hanaa Edwar, a human rights activist, was received on Sunday by a magistrate from the Supreme Council of the Judiciary to whom she presented the grievances of the feminists.
Their call was relayed in the process by the UN mission in Iraq, which called in a press release on the Iraqi government to “pass a law that explicitly criminalizes gender-based violence”.
Tiba al-Ali had been living in Turkey since 2017 and was visiting Iraq when her father killed her, a security official in Diwaniyah told AFP.
On her YouTube account, she posted videos of her daily life in which her fiancé very often appeared and she shared her experience after undergoing cosmetic surgery.
In recordings shared on social networks by a friend of Tiba and picked up by activists, we can hear snippets of conversations between the father, angry because his daughter lives alone in Turkey, and the latter who accuses her brother of the sexually harassed.
AFP could not independently verify the authenticity of these recordings.