Honor Related Violence (Syria)

Statistics on Honor Related Violence and Killings

The Syrian Women Observatory [SWO] has stated that between 200 and 300 honour killings are committed in Syria every year, the majority of which occur in rural and Bedouin communities. The SWO stated that half of the annual murder cases committed in Syria are cases of honour killing.

Syria Increases Penalty for Honour Killings
Saad Jarous, Asharq Alawsat, August 7, 2009

Syrian Penal Code

Article 548 of the Syrian Legal Code states: "1: He who catches his wife, or one of his ascendants, descendants or sister committing adultery (flagrante delicto) or illegitimate sex acts with another and he kills or injures one of both of them benefits from an exemption of penalty. 2: He who catches his wife, or one of his ascendants, descendants or sister in a suspicious state (attitude equivoce) with another and he kills or injures one of both of them benefits from an exemption of penalty."

Mutilation And Killing For Muslim "Honor": Religious Or Tribal Custom?
Adrian Morgan, The Family Security Foundation, Inc., June 26, 2007

Bushra, escaped from being murdered, 2007

Seventeen-year-old Bushra is too scared to give her real name. She talks in a low, trembling voice, her face full of fear.

"They want to shed my blood, they want to kill me," she says, as she recounts how she escaped being murdered by members of her own family in a so-called "honour killing".

A Sunni Muslim, she had fallen in love with Fadel, from Syria's Alawite Muslim minority. He went to her family to ask for her hand in marriage, but he was rejected.

The family said Bushra must marry her cousin. But on their wedding day, she ran away with the man she loved and family members began to hunt her down, to "erase the dishonour" she had caused.

Bushra's story is not an exceptional one in Syria, where women's organisations estimate more than 200 women are murdered every year by brothers, cousins or fathers.

But she is one of the lucky ones. Bushra was arrested after her family reported her to the police, and taken into custody.

The juvenile centre where now lives gives her some protection, but her freedom of movement is severely limited.

Honour crime fear of Syria women
Lina Sinjab, BBC News, October 12, 2007

Sheren, shot to death, January 2007

A new awful crime happened in a village 20 km from Idleb in Syria, where a 16 year old girl was murdered by her brother, who shot her after he has discovered that she was six months pregnant. Sheren was a very beautiful girl and fell in love with a man named Ghassan who was 45 years old, married and a father to 9 kids). They had a love relationship for more than a year. After her parents took her to a doctor and confirmed that Sheren was pregnant her brother shot her immediately.

16 years old killed!
Ricky, International Campaign Against Honour Killings, January 21, 2007

Zahra al-Azzo, stabbed to death, January 2007

Fawaz turned back one last time to tuck the blanket more snugly around his 16-year-old wife. Zahra slept on without stirring, and her husband locked the door of their tiny apartment carefully behind him.

Zahra was most likely still sleeping when her older brother, Fayyez, entered the apartment a short time later, using a stolen key and carrying a dagger. His sister lay on the carpeted floor, on the thin, foam mattress she shared with her husband, so Fayyez must have had to kneel next to Zahra as he raised the dagger and stabbed her five times in the head and back: brutal, tearing thrusts that shattered the base of her skull and nearly severed her spinal column. Leaving the door open, Fayyez walked downstairs and out to the local police station. There, he reportedly turned himself in, telling the officers on duty that he had killed his sister in order to remove the dishonor she had brought on the family by losing her virginity out of wedlock nearly 10 months earlier.

“Fayyez told the police, ‘It is my right to correct this error,’ ” Maha Ali, a Syrian lawyer who knew Zahra and now works pro bono for her husband, told me not long ago. “He said, ‘It’s true that my sister is married now, but we never washed away the shame.’ ”

By now, almost anyone in Syria who follows the news can supply certain basic details about Zahra al-Azzo’s life and death: how the girl, then only 15, was kidnapped in the spring of 2006 near her home in northern Syria, taken to Damascus by her abductor and raped; how the police who discovered her feared that her family, as commonly happens in Syria, would blame Zahra for the rape and kill her; how these authorities then placed Zahra in a prison for girls, believing it the only way to protect her from her relatives. And then in December, how a cousin of Zahra’s, 27-year-old Fawaz, agreed to marry her in order to secure her release and also, he hoped, restore her reputation in the eyes of her family; how, just a month after her wedding to Fawaz, Zahra’s 25-year-old brother, Fayyez, stabbed her as she slept.

Zahra died from her wounds at the hospital the following morning, one of about 300 girls and women who die each year in Syria in so-called honor killings, according to estimates by women’s rights advocates there.

a Dishonorable Affair
Katherinr Zoepp, The New York Times, September 23, 2007

Sahar, shot to death, May 2007

Sahar was 14 years old when she was married to a man, who was suffering from an illness which was believed to have rendered him infertile. He decided to undergo treatment and a surgical intervention, during which time Sahar became pregnant. Such a miracle would seem cause for celebration, yet Sahar’s relatives reacted only with suspicion. After persuading her husband that the child could not be his, and must have been conceived as the result of an extra-marital affair, Sahar was tried before the courts for “illicit relations”.

Medical experts testified that in the end Sahar’s husband was indeed fertile and DNA tests confirmed the child was his. The judge, however, believing that Sahar’s relatives would not be convinced even with this scientific evidence, placed her under the guard of an Alip - women`s shelter.

While in the shelter, Sahar received a visit from her brother-in-law, who convinced her that his family had been persuaded and truly believed her innocent. He asked her to come and live with him, offering guarantees that neither he nor anyone else would harm her. On May 24, this same brother-in-law fired three shots into her chest, killing her.

Sahar
SKSW, May 2007

Z.N., shot to death, April 2008

A 15 year old boy called MD shot and killed his sister ZN, who was 20 years old, in the village of Jubania, Qaseer, west Humms. She had been in a relationship with MH and had become pregnant, so the killer is unlikely to face any severe penalty.

Ten days: four reports of 'honour' killings
Joanne, International Campaign Against Honour Killings, May 4, 2008

Older man (m. D), aged / 15 / years old last Thursday to kill his sister (g. D) the amount of twenty years after the emergence of signs of pregnancy in the short-west of Homs.

The incident occurred in the village of Jawbanip of the short area (west of Homs, about 40 km).

In the investigation of the case before the district police found that the murdered woman was in a relationship with a young man from a nearby village (Bears), named (m. H) has carried him, which gave the case for her brother to kill her.

The killer benefit from the mitigating excuse for capital punishment in the case of honor killings, which raises a sensation among the legal community and social working in the field of women's rights in Syria.

The oldest offender to kill his sister by shooting it from the Russian-made hunting rifle with a barrel of one of the caliber / 12 mm /, where hit in the chest.

Sources in the Division of Forensic Medicine in Homs to Syria News that "the cause of death was severe visceral depravity and heavy bleeding."

For its part, wished Nahla prosperous lawyer in connection with Syria News "is that parents punish the instigators of the crime of murder, and in particular that the actor under the legal age."

Syria is ranked fifth in the world with regard to the so-called honor crimes.

Man kills his sister to get it "without marriage"
Ahmed H Stov, Syria News, April 23, 2008 (machine translated)

Young female, shot to death, April 2008

In Lathqia, a man was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment for the murder by shooting of his sister. The court made this decision based on a coroner's report stating that the victim's hymen was intact. He said had been told that his sister had been concealing a pregnancy for seven months.

Ten days: four reports of 'honour' killings
Joanne, International Campaign Against Honour Killings, May 4, 2008

Criminal Court in Latakia to 15 years imprisonment with hard labor against two young men were killed after accusing them of her sister that she was pregnant illegally, before the coroner's report shows that the girl was a virgin.

The newspaper (the revolution) local in its edition of Tuesday, that "One of the brothers claimed that he had heard from a relative that his sister was pregnant in the seventh month prior to the date of her wedding shortly prompting him to tell his brother, who participated with him in the murder of his sister by shooting it from a hunting rifle" .

The Criminal Court sentenced the young man called to condemn (AO) the premeditated murder of his sister as well as the conviction of his brother (and.) Is accused of participating in the commission of the crime.

Brother was murdered (and.) Is claimed in court that his nephew the other told him after requesting the girl to postpone her wedding two weeks that his aunt, which is about to marry, "holder illegally in the seventh month of pregnancy, and put a bond on her stomach to hide the features of this pregnancy, which paid directly to the incitement to kill his brother. "

Through investigations denied nephew killer to be his uncle told such a thing, as the forensic report that the girl was murdered virgin at all, prompting the court to consider the incident a murder instead of "honor killing", especially since some of the clues pointed to the greed of the case brothers and sister share the legacy of the legacy of her father.

Syrians governing sentenced to 15 years after the killing of their sister Mary under the pretext that she was pregnant
Syria News, April 29, 2008 (machine translated)

Khalidiya, strangled to death, May 2008

In Aleppo, Khalidiya, 23 years old and a mother of two was strangled to death by her brother Khaled who suspected her of having a relationship with another man

Ten days: four reports of 'honour' killings
Joanne, International Campaign Against Honour Killings, May 4, 2008

Older man in the third decade of life to kill his sister, and mother of two children against the backdrop of doubts established a relationship with men.

Attended (Khalid - p) to a police station in the province of Aleppo, reported that he had killed his sister (Khaldiya) strangled with his own hands, so "Honour".

The police patrol went to an area far away where the crime was committed, where the corpse of a woman in the third decade of life paradox. And was informed the Public Prosecutor, and was attended by the investigating judge, and the body has been examined the medical examination it was found to have occurred due to suffocation.

And to adjust the words brother "Khaled" It has been claimed that his sister was absent from home for a week, and he found that they were seen, accompanied by a stranger.

The Khaldiya 23-year old mother of two children under six, live with them in the absence of her husband, who is serving her husband in jail for more than a year.

"Honor killing" new and this time strangled Hand
Basil Dube, Syria News, May 1, 2008 (machine translated)

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