Weekly Worker 664 Thursday March 15 2007 Subscribe to the Weekly Worker

Braving death threats

On February 26, the notorious Jihadist Ansar al-Islam group, based in Kurdistan/Iraq, sent a death threat to Iraqi socialist and women’s rights activist Houzan Mahmoud, representative abroad of the Organisation of Women’s Freedom in Iraq. The email - imaginatively titled ‘Kill’ - reads: “With the permission of great god, we will kill you either in Iraq or in London by the middle of March, because you are campaigning against islam. You should be sent to god for punishment.” Houzan spoke to the Weekly Worker about the threat and her campaigning work that has provoked it.

We have been running a very successful campaign since the middle of December for the removal of article 7 from the draft constitution in Kurdistan. This explicitly states that sharia law must be a key source for legislation in the country. We view this as the forced islamisation of our society.

The campaign has attracted a great deal of attention, both in Kurdistan and globally. As a campaign coordinator I have had the opportunity to do many interviews criticising sharia law and calling for the separation of religion from the state. The death threat is in this sense a response to the success of our work.

We have received letters of support and encouragement from individuals and group the world over: it seems that people draw a great deal of encouragement and hope from a campaign that stands up to political islam. More importantly in some ways, the fact that I am a woman and am speaking out against this reactionary ideology is providing a degree of inspiration to others. That is what is frightening the political islamists so much. There is a mounting pressure on them and they have responded in this typical, cowardly way.

They threatened me last year over the telephone. I was then campaigning under the auspices of the Organisation of Women’s Freedom in Iraq against the proposed constitution for Iraq, in particular those sections based on sharia law. I had an article featured in The Independent and had several interviews with national and international TV.

I have received so much support from the movement - particularly in the USA, France and UK. This is enormously encouraging for me. It confirms me in my conviction that I have the right to campaign against political islam and to be an outspoken political woman without fear of being killed.

The best response is to up the tempo of the campaign against sharia law and I call on all organisations and individuals in the movement to lend us that invaluable support.

Please sign our campaign and circulate it as widely as possible. You can download a copy from www.petitiononline.com/15122006/petition.html.

Houzan can be contacted via email at houzan73@yahoo.co.uk.

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