By Jong Ho Lee —
Five times Banaz Mahmod went to the UK police. Five times the cops didn’t believe her. Then her father, uncle and cousins brutally killed her. To save the family’s honor.
“They let these people come into the house and take her and her life, stuff her into a suitcase, and to take her away in a hired car miles away, to be buried in an abandoned home like she was trash that just got taken out, says Banaz’s sister, Bekhal, who testified in court against her own family.
Welcome to Islam. The West, which views Christianity as evil, assumes that the Religion of Peace must be everything different, glossing over such things as honor killings and women’s rights.
“It should be called the devil’s work,” says Bekhal who herself was nearly killed by her brother. “Honor has nothing to do with it at all. It’s dishonor. Disloyalty.”
Banaz and Bekhal Mahmod were born and raised in Kurdish Iraq. Their father would fly into a violent rage over little things: Petting a dog, looking at a man in the street, wearing makeup or nail polish, plucking eyebrows and shaving legs were all infractions that incurred savage beatings.
When Bekhal was eight, all the girls of the family were subjected to Female Genital Mutilation in order to preserve their purity. Her grandmother cut too much on Bekhal, and the girl nearly bled out.
The family immigrated to the United Kingdom in 1998. The girls wished to adopt some Western customs and experience a bit of freedom. Their dad intensified his strict control over their lives, insisting they keep the ways of Islam, which urges husbands to beat their wives and male guardians to beat daughters and sisters.
The lived in the Kurdish community of South London where everyone covered for each other to keep authorities out of internal matters.
Bekhal ran away from home. Banaz was forced to marry a first cousin who treated her like a slave and subjected her continually to domestic rape. She sought refuge in the UK police and UK social services, which at the time was so worried about disrespecting people from other cultures that they took her for a hysterical and delusional girl.
For leaving home of her own accord, Bekhal was nearly killed by her brother, who struck her over the head with a dumbbell but couldn’t bring himself to complete the act.
The spiritual authority for the family, an uncle, decreed that Banaz must die because she left her husband and fell in love with another man with whom she was seen kissing. At a family meeting, plans were laid.
The parents left the house. First cousins entered. Mohammed Saleh Ali, Omar Hussain and Mohamad Hama spent hours torturing and raping 20-year-old Banaz, before strangling her to death on Jan. 24 2006.
Her boyfriend alerted police when she no longer responded by phone. The Muslim Kurdish community blocked and resisted the Metropolitan police’s investigation. People gave alibis for the responsible parties.
UK Detective Superintendent Caroline Goode made legal history by extraditing two of the killers from Iraqi Kurdistan, where they had fled. In all, 50 Kurds were implicated the murder of Banaz. Her father, Mahmod Mahmod, was sentenced to 20 years in jail. Her uncle, Ari Mahmod, received 23 years.
“I’m always having nightmares because I know what they did to her,” Bekhal says. She’s under witness protection in the UK because now the Muslims are seeking her to kill her.
Bekhal is fighting for legislation to make misogynistic cultural or religious defenses aggravating, not mitigating, factors in cases of femicide and gender-based violence in the UK.
