"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".



No woman can feel safe unless the law is changed, activists say.
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 organizations 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 center where she now lives gives her some protection, but her freedom of movement is severely limited.


I couldn't believe this headline at first. Our own youth don't know how lucky they are. This is a tragedy. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7042249.stm

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Another example...

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Ari Mahmod held his head up when he went to prison. He felt no embarrassment. And why should he? After all, he said, it was not as if he was locked up for something as inconsequential or shameful as theft. He was sure that, back in the real world of suburban Mitcham, south London, among his own people, they would be thanking his family for what he had done, taking pride in the decisive way he had acted.

Many people might find it hard to comprehend that any man could take pride – pleasure, even – in the brutal murder of his niece. Banaz Mahmod had been beaten, probably raped, and finally strangled with a bootlace in the living room at home. Her uncle Ari had not been there, but he had planned it, knew exactly what was happening, and had been waiting nearby?waiting for his family reputation to be restored.

As he liked to say, in his culture, reputation was more important than life itself. That was why it had to be done – why his brother’s daughter had to die.

In Kurdish Iraq – as elsewhere in parts of south Asia and the Middle East – they would not even have needed to bother hiding the body. Honour crimes – such as the recent stoning to death in Iraq of Du’a Khalil Aswad, a 17-year-old Kurdish girl who had fallen in love with the wrong boy – were at the time often committed by a group or crowd of men, quite openly, in public.

In Du’a’s case, her death had been recorded on mobile-phone cameras and uploaded onto YouTube, where two police officers could be seen standing about doing nothing while Du’a was killed. In Kurdistan, honour crimes are still being committed at the rate of three or four a week and, despite a recent tightening of the law, offenders are still going unpunished or receiving light sentences.

But in Mitcham, purifying the family shame was not quite as straightforward as Ari might have wished. And not everyone thought being an honour killer was quite so honourable.
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It's disgusting.