(Beirut) – A prominent Iraqi women’s rights activist was gunned down outside her Baghdad home by two men on motorcycles on March 2, 2026, Human Rights Watch said today.
Yanar Mohammed, 65, co-founded the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq in 2003. She opened Iraq’s first women’s shelters that same year, building a network that eventually spanned multiple cities and provided refuge for more than 1,300 women fleeing honor killings, domestic violence, and trafficking, the organization said. She also published the feminist newspaper Al-Mousawat (Equality) and ran classes for women’s rights activists. She was awarded the Gruber Foundation Women’s Rights Prize in 2008 and Norway’s Rafto Prize in 2016 and was listed among BBC’s 100 Women in 2018.
“Yanar Mohammed was formidable, indefatigable, and an inspiring leader for women’s rights in Iraq,” said Sarah Sanbar, Iraq researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Her efforts improved the lives of countless women, and her loss is being felt deeply. Yanar Mohammed deserves justice, and the Iraqi government is responsible for delivering it.”
Mohammed was transferred to a hospital but died of her injuries. No group has claimed responsibility for her assassination. Mohammed’s killing is the latest in a series of high-profile killings of political activists and human rights defenders in Iraq over the past decade. The authorities should make every effort to identify those responsible and hold them accountable, Human Rights Watch said.
In a statement, her organization said: “We strongly condemn this cowardly terrorist crime and consider it a direct targeting of feminist struggle and the values of freedom and equality,” and called on the authorities to “immediately reveal the perpetrators and the parties behind them and ensure their accountability under the law.”
Civic space in Iraq, particularly for women’s rights activists, has been increasingly under threat over recent years. Women’s rights groups faced heightened threats and backlash as a result of organizing to fight the passage of an abusive amendment to the country’s Personal Status Law, which ultimately came into force in January 2025.
Iraqi authorities have consistently failed to deliver justice for the families of assassinated human rights defenders and political activists over the past decade, Human Rights Watch said. Instead, they have allowed a culture of impunity for serious abuses against activists to fester. Assassinations like Mohammed’s are the expected, and entirely preventable, outcome of this impunity, Human Rights Watch said.
“Yanar’s assassins don’t understand that killing her does not kill the pursuit of justice, equality, and empowerment that she embodied,” Sanbar sad. “Her legacy will live on in the women who carry forward her work.”
