In the case mentioned, 17-year old Du’a Khalil Aswad, who is Yezidi, was stoned to death for falling in love with a Muslim boy. While murder is the obvious extreme, violence against women is embedded deep within the Kurdish culture and it can take many forms.

“Women are being harassed, they are insulted, they are heart broken and that might be more than killing,” said teacher and lawyer Pekin Meeran Ismail. “If women are insulted, then a sensitive woman might feel as if she is killed every day, and especially in Middle Eastern societies, women are insulted in different forms with abusive language. I believe that it is bigger than killing.”

As northern Iraq starts to modernize, there are more groups willing to step up and champion the cause of women’s rights, and even the government is starting to take proactive steps in combating the problem.

“In 2003 we passed a law in the Kurdish Parliament that deals with those committing honor killings as homicide, and there are people who were convicted on these charges,” noted Qaradaghi. “As a result, the rate of such acts decreased sharply and this is obvious in the reports of the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of the Interior.”

“Unfortunately, society’s view of women is still that they are weaker, which has affected women’s role in the family,” she added.

Recent research has shown that there is a direct relationship between the level of education in an area and the amount of violence there is against women there. So now there is a concerted effort to go out to the remote villages in Iraqi Kurdistan and inform people about women’s rights.

Qaradaghi said that, “Raising the level of awareness makes women understand their rights and suffer less from violence. We have found that more than 70% of the women that have encountered violence are illiterate. Also, more than 90% of those who are committing violence against women are also illiterate. As a result, we conclude that raising awareness leads to lessening violence.”

And while there is still a long ways to go before Kurdistan meets international standards of equality, recent elections and the promise of a new government bring hope that change on a national scale may be coming soon.

Hamdia Ahmed Najif, Iraq’s Deputy Minister for Displacement and Migration, expressed hope that women in Iraq will have a lobby in the new parliament “that would be able to put forward realistic proposals for amending the constitution in everything that concerns women’s rights in Iraq.”