Prominent feminist activist Yanar Mohammed shot dead in Iraq

Gunmen shot dead prominent Iraqi feminist Yanar Mohammed outside her home in Baghdad on Monday, her organisation announced.

The Organisation for Women's Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), which was co-founded by Mohammed in 2003, said she was critically wounded in the shooting and despite being taken to hospital and efforts to save her, she "succumbed to her injuries".

"The passing of Yanar Mohammed is a tremendous loss to the feminist movement, but her legendary legacy will live on in every woman whose life was restored thanks to her support, and in every situation that refused violence and discrimination," the organisation said in a statement on Facebook.

"We pledge to keep the safe houses open, and the organisation’s voice remains loud defending women and their right to a safe dignified life."

So far, no group has claimed responsibility for her killing.

Mohammed, who was also a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Alternative Organisation in Iraq, was a staunch opponent of sectarian and discriminatory legislation in the country and founded OWFI to provide protection for women victims of violence.

In recent years, she had been at the forefront of the campaign against a new law enshrining Shia religious jurisprudence in family law, which would give husbands automatic custody over children and a unilateral right to divorce without the wife's consent.

Although the legislation was passed, the outcry saw it stripped of some of its most controversial elements, including reducing the minimum age of marriage for girls to nine. 

Speaking to Middle East Eye in 2024, Mohammed said the government was trying to push the "archaic" laws as a means of distracting from its own failings, including "huge corruption".

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"Their most efficient tool for this distraction is to terrorise Iraqi women and civil society with a legislation that strips away all the rights that Iraqi women gained in modern times, and force archaic Islamic sharia on them that regards women as bodies for pleasure and breeding, and not as human being[s] with human rights," she said.

Government critics, including women's rights campaigners, are regularly kidnapped and killed in Iraq by armed groups.

In 2018, gunmen in the city of Basra shot dead women's rights campaigner Suad al-Ali, founder of al-Weed al-Alaiami for Human Rights, while activist and nutritionist Riham Yacoub was killed in the same city in 2020.

While repeated governments in Iraq have promised to stop the assassination of activists and bring their killers to justice, the links between the ruling Coordination Framework and a number of armed groups operating in Iraq have made campaigners sceptical.

In a statement, the Communist Alternative Organisation in Iraq said they would hold the government responsible for bringing Mohammed's killers to justice.

"The memory of Comrade Yanar Mohammed will remain a shining flame guiding our struggle for women’s liberation and the communist struggle for a world free of all forms of injustice, discrimination and oppression," they wrote.