Cellphone videos that depict a teenage girl being stoned to death by a crowd surfaced online last week. Statements on the Kurdish website jebar.info claim the incident took place in Mosul, Iraq, and that the girl was Du’a Khalil Aswad, a 17-year old Kurd who was being killed for having had a relationship with a Sunni Muslim boy in a nearby town. These same online accounts indicate that some of the same members of the crowd who were stoning her to death were simultaneously documenting the act on their mobile phones:
In a short mobile video clip which appears to have been taken by locals at seen of the murder, the girl is seen being ambushed on her way home by a group of up to 1000 men who were waiting for her to return; the men killed her in the most brutal way possible, by throwing large stones on her head. The following clips show that while she is alive and crying for help she is taunted and kicked in her stomach until someone finishes her off by throwing a large stone on her face.From the clips it appears that the girl was first stripped naked to symbolize that she had dishonored her family and her Yezidi religion. She is lying on the road naked while her smashed face is covered with blood and still breathing.
.3gp video files (warning: contains extremely graphic violence) and account at kurdishaspect.com. I see related reports at Daily Mail and Foxnews.com, but there’s nothing online at sources I’d consider more reputable — so I don’t know how reliable the reported details of this incident are.
According to the online reports that do exist, these phonecam videos were uploaded to YouTube also. But a quick search on YouTube now shows: “This video has been removed due to terms of use violation.”
Related: 30 Iraqis died in a car bomb attack in Iraq today, and more than 600 civilians are reported to have died in the week prior.
UPDATE: BoingBoing reader Derek says,
AP mentions a similar story of the incident, so what happened seems to be established. As a bit of an update, the article is mainly about how a gunman executed a bus full of Yazidis in response to the stoning of the girl. Vicious circle.
At least 23 have been killed in retaliatory violence: Link to Amnesty International statement. Peaceful protest rallies against the violence took place in Erbil: Link to blog account.