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Iraqi Kurdistan Fails to Address Violence Against Women

Violence, self-immolation and suicide continue to plague the Iraqi Kurdistan Region’s women, with a shortage of civic institutions to deal with these issues.
Kurdish women walk past a truck that was hit in the 1988 chemical attack at the memorial site for victims of the attack in the Kurdish town of Halabja, near Sulaimaniya, 260 km (160 miles) northeast of Baghdad, March 16, 2013. Iraqi Kurds on Saturday marked the 25th anniversary of the chemical attack on the northern Iraqi city of Halabja by Saddam Hussein's forces. Up to 5,000 people may have been killed by chemical gas, villages were razed and thousands of Kurds were forced into camps during the 1988 Anfal
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Not a day passes by without hearing about the death of a woman or the suicide of another, whether by self immolation or other methods. These women resort to suicide to save themselves from squalid living conditions, to wash away shame or as a result of the customs and traditions prevailing in the province and by which Kurdish society still abides.

Perhaps the most prominent of these cases is what was published on July 11 in Kurdish media outlets about the bodies of a 14-year-old girl and a 16-year-old boy found near a village in Sulaimaniyah. The young couple had been shot by their parents for having fled their homes, following the disclosure of their whirlwind romance. The two youngsters had decided to escape and get married despite the their parents' objection.

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