Honour Murder

BBC reporter Namak Khoshnaw has returned to Kurdistan, the country of his birth, to investigate attitudes towards honour killings. What he finds is a deeply ingrained practice that normalises violence against women and treats the murderers as victims. But there is hope, in the form of activists like Ronak Farag, who are trying to change perceptions and offer shelter and support to women at risk of death at the hands of their relatives. Ronak Farag examines her photo album. Rather than holiday snaps it contains images of murdered women; the ones she was unable to save. Holding back tears, Ronak tells the camera “It’s not just them. I have a folder full and I talk to them. We have dozens of unsolved cases; no one cares about them”. She has just lost another of her charges, 21-year-old Sunwr Omar, murdered for dishonouring her family. The murder of Sunwr Omar was unlike any other: it made the front pages. Fed up and disgusted at the failure of her family to bury her, activists and politicians spoke out at the brutal honour killing culture prevalent in Kurdistan. “We knew that she would get killed because her father clearly told me… that wherever he sees her, he would kill her”, reveals activist Ronak Farag.