Girl is dragged to an abandoned house and shot by her tribe in ‘honour killing’ in Syria

A girl was dragged to an abandoned house and shot by her tribe in a so-called ‘honour killing’ after she tried to run away with her lover and refused to marry her cousin in Syria.

A video circulated online shows the young woman, who has been identified as 18-year-old Eida Al-Hamoudi Al-Saeedo, being shot in a desolate village on the outskirts of the northeastern Syrian city of Al-Hasakah. 

Eida had tried to run away with her lover but her family and tribe followed her before capturing her, reports Akhbaralaan.net.

The horrific footage shows Eida being dragged by a group of three men who were carrying guns while she screams for help.           

The video then pans to other men who are stood by a wall of the abandoned house before three shots can be heard. 

The footage then shows Eida lying on the ground and she appears to be struggling to get up, before one man points a gun at her and shoots her dead. The woman’s body is covered with a red blanket by the tribesmen. 

Just days after the video of Eida’s murder emerged on social media, a 16-year-old girl was strangled to death by her father in another ‘honour killing’ after she was raped by a relative.

Eida, who is from the city of Al-Hasakah, had been taken to an abandoned house and her father and brother, along with other men from the Al-Sharabain tribe murdered her, reports Syrian news site Alarabiya.

Her family and tribe then shot her in an ‘honor killing’ for falling in love with a young man and refusing to marry her cousin, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR).

The young man had proposed to her but Eida’s family had prohibited the marriage because he was from a different clan. 

After the ‘honour killing’, Eida’s family published the video on social media ‘in order to announce cleansing the shame according to their tribal beliefs’, the SOHR said in a statement.  

‘SOHR strongly denounces this horrible crime calling for bringing the perpetrators on charges of murder and publishing the videos under the name of ‘honor crime’, the Observatory said in a statement.

Eida had been starved and beaten for many days before being executed by her family, said the Violations Documentation Center in northern Syria, which identified Eida Al-Hamoudi Al-Saeedo as the victim of the attack.

‘[She was] brutally assaulted until the crime was completed by killing her with machine guns and pistols by more than one person,’ a spokesperson for the center told the news site. 

‘[The family] bragged about publishing a horrific video clip showing the murder of a girl by bullets, near an abandoned house in the countryside. 

‘They seemed happy with their crime as they took turns to abuse the body of the weak, frightened, terrified girl, and each of the 11 people who participated in the crime received a share of her blood,’ they added. 

The man who Eida had fallen in love with reportedly managed to escape from the tribe as the family ‘feared a reprisal’ from his family if they attacked him.

‘Her sin was to love another man whom they couldn’t touch fearing of reprisal between the two families,’ the center said in a statement on Twitter.   

The video footage of the shooting has spread across social media and sparked a wave of anger with activists calling for the perpetrators to be prosecuted and for the violence and killing of women to stop.  

Writer Sameh Shukri tweeted: A new crime of honor and racism against women, killing a Syrian girl in the city of #Hasakah for accusing her of love and adultery.

‘And the killer this time is not an ISIS who applies Sharia, but rather her clan and extremist youth who believe that with this crime they have become from The owners of heaven, whoever incites against women and spreads their hatred is responsible for killing the Hasaka girl.’

Just days after the video of Eida’s murder emerged on social media, a 16-year-old girl was murdered by her father on Monday in another ‘honour killing’. 

The girl, who has been identified as Aya Muhammad Khalifo by the Violations Documentation Center in northern Syria, was strangled by her father. 

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the man strangled his daughter, who had been raped by a relative more than a year ago.  

Hundreds of women protested against the ‘honour killings’ in the city of Hasakeh on Tuesday and marched down streets, some wearing a white t-shirt marked ‘No to violence’ in red letters.

‘Stop killing women,’ read one sign. ‘There is no honour in murder,’ said another.                  

The protesters gathered outside the home of the 16-year-old girl who is the latest victim. 

‘We condemn these crimes in the name of tradition or religion,’ said protester Evin Bacho, a member of the Kurdish feminist group Kongra Star.

She said the gathering was ‘against any family that gives itself the right to deprive a woman of her freedom’. 

Protester Intissar al-Hamadi demanded the perpetrators of such murders be held to account.

‘No religion or morality allows this,’ she said.

In the Kurdish zones of Syria, ‘honour crimes’ and ‘violence and discrimination’ against women are officially outlawed, as is polygamy, although it is permitted in Islam.

In Damascus last year, authorities scrapped part of a law that allowed those who had killed a female relative to invoke mitigating circumstances to cut their sentence.

Syria’s decade-long war has killed half a million people and displaced millions more, and also compounded violence against women.

Rural areas are still deeply conservative and tribal, often imposing severe restrictions on women’s freedom.