Murdered and forgotten: Iraqi victims of gender-based violence [Video]

In a sun-baked cemetery in northern Iraq, silence lingers over a forsaken corner devoid of mourners, where women killed in gender-based violence rest in unmarked graves.

Domestic violence and femicide have long plagued Iraq’s conservative society, including through so-called “honour killings” — the murders of women deemed to have breached patriarchal social norms, often at the hands of close relatives.

In the unmarked section of the Siwan cemetery in Sulaimaniyah, the second city of the autonomous Kurdistan region, many of the headstones are blank.

Some are inscribed only with numbers that correspond to forensic records, and the signs have faded with time as wild scrub has covered the tombs.

Lawyer and activist Rozkar Ibrahim, 33, pointed to three adjacent burial plots, the final resting places of a man, a woman and their child.

The couple fell in love and had the child without their families’ approval, said Ibrahim, who regularly …