In this personal tribute, Nazli Tarzi, a family friend of Yanar Mohammed, reflects on the life and legacy of one of Iraq’s fiercest women’s rights defenders.

On 1 March, Iraq’s fiercest women’s rights defender and a family friend, Yanar Mohammed, was taken from us. The 66-year-old anti-war activist and president of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI) was murdered by drive-by militiamen outside her Baghdad home. But even for a country where death is routine and where hitmen are in business, the grief is never easier, never lighter, and takes decades to metabolise.

It was a typically dull Monday, when during my lunchtime Instagram scroll Yanar – a familiar face – appeared on my feed.

“Murdered,” the post read.

The lights went out. I felt my chest tighten, a gasp escaped, and I began pacing, blinking back the tears. Now that a week has passed, the initial sadness felt by me, Yanar’s family, and the countless women she helped has now hardened into propulsive fury cascading across social media. Who hired the men to assassinate her? Why Yanar? Why now? These are but a few of the questions we demand answers to. We demand justice.

I pictured the ambush, Yanar being rushed to hospital, and the horror registered on the faces of the medics unable to save her. My heart crumples like paper scraps tossed into the bin.

Born in 1960, Yanar – like my own family – belonged to the Turcoman community concentrated in northern Iraq. Two years before Yanar was born, Iraq was ruptured by the bloodiest political transition in its modern history. The monarchy was toppled in the 1958 coup d’état, bringing the Soviet-aligned Iraqi Communist Party into power and opening rifts the country never fully recovered from.

Communist rule proved short-lived, and the party’s removal from power in the 1960s forced Yanar’s family into exile. They settled in Lebanon, where they lived comfortably until the Lebanese civil war displaced them again in the mid-1970s. The family eventually returned to Iraq, where Yanar enrolled at the University of Baghdad, earning a bachelor’s degree in engineering in 1984 and a master’s degree in 1993.

A year later, she fled to Canada as Iraq under Ba’ath Party rule sank deeper into authoritarianism.

The incident not only typifies Iraq’s backslide into lawlessness but also the enduring 23-year-old curse of unchecked weapons that has shaped the country since the 2003 US-led invasion. Though their identity remains unknown, Yanar Mohammed had faced years of harassment and death threats from armed groups and militias opposed to her work defending women’s rights. In 2004, after establishing OWFI following Saddam’s fall, Yanar faced similar threats, and the Americans, who she appealed to for help, denied her protection – citing ‘more important’ matters. Two decades later, the Iraqi state would go on to deny her the same protection. The brave feminist and defender of women’s rights was no shrinking violet when it came to speaking truth to power.

In 2003, Yanar returned to Iraq to establish the Organisation of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), finding her country devastated by sectarian conflict and foreign intervention. She returned alongside other exiled Iraqis – communist activists, labour organisers, and intellectuals banished for decades.

As the US-backed political order descended into sectarian factionalism, Yanar increasingly aligned herself with the feminist cause. The fear that women would disappear from public and political life spurred what became her life’s mission: building a movement capable of defending women’s rights in an increasingly hostile environment.

Yanar was an intellectual powerhouse and “a force of nature,” one relative describes her (whose identity, as per their wishes, has been protected for fear of reprisals). She spoke out fearlessly against what she described as “the state of male privilege and deep-set oppression and disdain against women” In Iraq. Those of us who knew Yanar remember how fiercely protective she was of Iraqi women who she guarded like a lioness protecting her cubs from prey.

Her organisation, OWFI, which she returned to Iraq to build, was not interested in emulating the pageantry of white feminism. OWFI placed the community at the heart of everything they did, and thrust the realities of Iraqi women back onto the international stage. The organisation, Yanar’s gift to Iraq, fought doggedly to facilitate dialogue, and educate civil society and governmental agencies about the risks women face and ways to safeguard them.

OWFI was not the first feminist organisation in Iraq, but what cemented Yanar’s place among her peers was her unyielding resolve to protect women. She took the bold step of establishing shelters – which she called “safe houses” – for women trafficked, brutalised, or threatened with death.

She looked out for the underdog, without hesitation. She met with female death row prisoners and lobbied on their behalf, and teamed up with lawyers to pass a fiercely contested anti-domestic violence bill. Her crowning achievement, among many, are the community-led shelters she founded for women and children fleeing domestic and tribal violence. They flourished and thrived but, in Yanar’s own words, “I found myself an enemy to the state.” They put a target on her back and the Iraqi government pursued Yanar in the courts. OWFI was the subject of multiple lawsuits, accused of operating “illegal refuge shelters” which they alleged violated the Law of Non-Governmental Organisations (No. 12 of 2002).

The Iraqi state treated her like a problem child, indifferent to the critical refugee services they offered to women trafficked by their families and sold off as debt bondage. The government’s endgame was the liquidation of OWFI, and even with that, they failed. But perhaps what irked the state more than Yanar’s secular, progressive sensibilities, was her unflinching critique of state corruption and the codification of sectarianism into laws by a solipsistic political class she was not afraid to challenge. Their rule, Yanar believed, sent the country hurtling back to the dark ages.

Under Yanar’s direction, OWFI led the legal fight against proposed amendments to Iraq’s 1959 Personal Status law, the legislation that governs family affairs. The changes, lobbied for by religious hardline MPs, eventually passed in 2025. They grant Shia clerics adherent to the Ja’afri school jurisdiction over family matters, authorised to marry off girls as young as 15 –  effectively legalising statutory rape. In fact, the original draft proposed sanctioning marriage for girls as young as 9. Despite these changes, Yanar was insistent that “the feminist Iraqi movement exists […] we’re going nowhere and will continue to fight until we achieve equality.”

The feminist crusader viewed religious dogma and tribalism in the new Iraq as a carte blanche stripping girls and women of their basic rights. A month before her murder, Walid Omran, a TV anchor notorious for his sectarian rhetoric, ridiculed Yanar in a defamatory episode of his programme Mukas Balas. It was a typical assassination of character, miscasting her as an enemy of religion. Some activists have argued that the video was part of a broader campaign of incitement that ultimately led to her assassination.

Commenting on the use of violence to crush dissent, cleric-turned-activist Ghaith Al-Tamimi argued that Yanar’s assassination “exposes a mentality reminiscent of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime, where security personnel are reduced to political functionaries carrying out party orders driven by ideological or religious motives.”

Independent politician Ayad Allawi wrote on Facebook that Yanar’s murder was “an unacceptable attempt to silence voices demanding reform,” and called for an immediate independent inquiry – a call widely echoed by thousands in Iraq and human rights organisations. We’ve been here before however. An inquiry gets launched, a committee is formed, and perpetrators get off Scot-free. So far we know that the Minister of Interior has ordered the formation of an investigation team to determine what happened. The Facebook community page Lest We Forget, published a commemorative post whose headline read, “Honoured in Norway, murdered in Baghdad,” underscoring the tragic irony for Iraqi human rights defenders – recognised and praised abroad while shunned, defamed, and worse, murdered back home.

Noor, who writes for the OWFI-run newspaper, Mussawat (equality), which Yanar presided over, shared the following tribute pulsating with grief and heartache: “you weren’t just part of me, you were the characteristics that gave form to my soul. The awareness I relied upon and the voice that taught me to never bend or cower. As I search for words worthy of you, the letters dry up before they can write your name. It’s as though time refuses to move on without you.”

While another colleague wrote: “I feel as if a chunk, the size of my homeland, was ripped from my chest. With Yanar gone, I didn’t just lose a friend, I’ve lost the shadow that walked beside me through the most rugged roads, a voice that preceded my fears, and a heart that knew how to turn anger into a stance and channel pain into action.”

Beneath it all, beneath Yanar’s impenetrable armour, it became apparent as I spoke to her friends, colleagues and families – apprehensive to speak on the record out of fear for their lives  – that Yanar was a friend, wife, sister, mother, and aunt, who loved generously and tenderly.

A female relative in Canada who wishes to remain anonymous shared the following message: “Our family is grieving the loss of an incredible woman, political organiser, family member and friend. She was fearlessly outspoken in her political struggles for women’s freedom, but I will also remember her as being deeply joyful and full of light. Her work was rooted in immense love for the women and people of Iraq, and by the conviction that they deserved so much better. May we remember her legacy and may her fight for women’s equality, freedom and justice be carried forward.”

I bristled at the thought of checking my conversation trail with Yanar, afraid of the pain that would surface. Her last words to me were, “Nazli sorry for not responding earlier. The legal intimidations had taken all my energy.”

Yanar will be remembered as an Iraqi patriot, an intersectional feminist, and a woman known for her clear-eyed critique of endemic corruption, government-sanctioned patriarchy, imperialism, and authoritarianism.

“They took away her life, but they can’t erase her legacy,” a former colleague of Yanar, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told me.

If anything, the reverence felt for Yanar will continue to blossom, and her unjust murder cannot extinguish the memory of her unswerving loyalty to the feminist cause, and Iraq as a whole. The army of women who make up Iraq’s feminist movement, from friends to comrades and allies, have vowed to keep Yanar’s memory alive, honour her name, and hold the perpetrators to account. An entire generation of women can live better, dream better thanks to Yanar. You’ll be dearly missed.