Young woman allegedly killed by family in Erbil

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - A young woman, who made headlines in November after being thrown off the balcony of an apartment in Erbil, was killed on Wednesday morning allegedly by members of her family.

Fairuz Azad was severely injured after being thrown off a building in central Erbil’s Eskan Towers complex in November. The 19-year-old woman survived the fall, which caused her to break a leg and crack her pelvis and spine.

Local security forces (Asayish) at the time announced the arrest of two suspects, stating that they had thrown Fairuz off the fifth floor of the building after an argument.

While receiving treatment for her injuries, Fairuz told Rudaw from a hospital bed days after the incident that she had been raped by one of the men in the apartment, but fought off the other man’s attempt to force himself onto her as well, leading them to throw her off the building.

Fairuz was fatally shot in her own home, in her bed, on Wednesday morning by a group of assailants, identified by her mother as Fairuz’s biological father, brother, cousins, and other relatives.

“I woke up to the sound of gunshots… They had killed her in her bed… I saw them all,” Naza Farhad, Fairuz’s mother told Rudaw’s Bakhtiyar Qadir, identifying at least seven family members who were involved in the killing.

Farhad said that the father had called and threatened to kill Fairuz days earlier, after the suspects published photos of themselves on social media following their release from prison.

“We called him [the suspect] and begged him to delete the post, saying ‘this will get her killed.’ We called his sister and his father, but they did not listen to us and it led to this,” said Shahin Nahro, Fairuz’s stepfather.

The mother lamented that the suspects were released due to their “strong connections” to officials, decrying that the biological father could also escape punishment because of such ties.

There has been no official comments from security forces and relevant authorities on the killing as of the time of this writing.

The Kurdistan Region suffers from high rates of gender-based violence, including sexual violence, domestic violence, so-called honor violence, child marriage, and female genital mutilation. Countless incidents of abuse go unreported on a yearly basis due to the stigma of linking such cases to “family honor” by the society’s conservative-majority population.

At least 30 women were killed in the Kurdistan Region in 2023, according to the Combatting Violence against Women Directorate.