It is with great sadness that I share news of the killing by two terrorist men of feminist revolutionary activist, Yanar Mohammed. I was blessed to meet and speak with her many years ago. I am devastated by her loss.
Yanar Mohammed was a prominent Iraqi woman human rights defender and feminist, and the co-founder and director of the Organisation of Women's Freedom in Iraq (OWFI). Since 2003, she had worked to protect women facing gender-based violence, including domestic abuse, trafficking, and so-called ‘honour killings.’ Under her leadership, OWFI established a network of safe houses across several Iraqi cities, providing protection and support to hundreds of women. Yanar Mohammed led these efforts despite all the ongoing impediments and risks. She was a strong advocate for secularism and women’s equality. Throughout her activism, Yanar Mohammed faced death threats and, at times, was forced to restrict her movement. (Source: https://www.frontlinedefenders.org/en/case/killing-woman-human-rights-defender-and-feminist-yanar-mohammed)
What follows next is from MADRE, here: https://www.madre.org/media-item/yanarmohammed/
On the Assassination of Feminist Leader Yanar Mohammed
Today, Yanar Mohammed – one of the most formidable feminist leaders of her generation – was assassinated in her home in Baghdad in what appears to have been a targeted militia attack. We are devastated by her loss, and we mourn with all the people who loved her and whose lives she changed.
For years, Yanar lived under constant threat, as anti-rights and fundamentalist forces sought to suppress her activism for human rights and democracy. As the Founder of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), she built an enduring feminist infrastructure to support women and girls confronting violence, displacement, and systemic repression, and to lay the foundation for a better future. She provided food and shelter for survivors of violence and demanded an end to war and militarization.
She knew all too well how warmaking devastates communities and accelerates attacks on human rights defenders. In 2004, just after the US launched its war on Iraq, she founded OWFI to protect women, girls, and other marginalized people from these dangers. Almost immediately, she received death threats. She refused to be silent – instead, she called for the solidarity of the international women’s movement. MADRE responded to her, spotlighting her lifesaving work, demanding action from US policymakers, and launching decades of partnership.
Together, MADRE and OWFI provided humanitarian aid, human rights trainings, and community-led organizing for peace and justice throughout Iraq. We provided advocacy and legal support as OWFI fought back against restrictions on women’s shelters and against a years-long campaign of state harassment to impede their work. We will continue to stand by OWFI now, in these terrible days.
Yanar’s assassination is a stark reminder of the risks feminist leaders continue to face globally, and of the ongoing threats to human rights movements. Yet, we also remember that Yanar’s life was a testament to feminist courage rooted in action and fueled by love. She protected people where there was danger, created platforms where women could speak out, and insisted that all people deserve full rights.
As we grieve, we honor a beautiful life that propelled justice – with joy, purpose, love and courage.
Update:
The Yanar Mohammed Feminist Defense Fund was created to honor Yanar and support urgent needs of the organization she founded, Organization of Women’s Freedom In Iraq (OWFI). In addition, Yanar’s Fund will support women in Iraq and throughout the region who defend women’s human rights and carry forward Yanar’s legacy.
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What follows is from here: https://marxist.com/assassination-of-yanar-mohammed.htm
We publish here a statement sent to us by the Communist Alternative Organization in Iraq on the tragic death of their comrade Yanar Mohammed, who was assassinated this morning in a criminal terrorist attack at her home. We send our sympathy and solidarity to Yanar’s comrades, family and friends.
Statement on the assassination of dear comrade Yanar Mohammed
With profound sadness, grief, and immense pain, we announce the passing of our dear comrade Yanar Mohammed, President of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI) and member of the Central Committee of the Communist Alternative Organization.
At 9:00 AM Iraq time this morning, Monday, March 2, 2026, two terrorist criminals on a motorcycle opened fire on Comrade Yanar Mohammed at her residence in Baghdad, inflicting severe injuries. Shortly after arriving at the hospital, she tragically passed away.
While we condemn in the strongest possible terms this brutal terrorist crime against a great fighter for the cause of women’s liberation and equality, and a firm, persistent communist militant for human emancipation, we hold the government responsible for uncovering the perpetrators and bringing them to justice.
The memory of Comrade Yanar Mohammed will remain a shining beacon for us in the struggle for women’s liberation and the communist struggle for a world free from all forms of injustice, discrimination, and oppression.
We will issue a later statement regarding the details of the life and struggle of our dear comrade Yanar Mohammed and will announce the dates for memorial services to honor her memory in Iraq and abroad.
The Central Committee of the Communist Alternative Organization in Iraq
March 2, 2026
[We also publish below a biographical note about Yanar Mohammed, sent to us by her comrades in the Communist Alternative Organization in Iraq. What stands out is the figure of a comrade who stood up bravely for the liberation of women and the oppressed, against the barbarism into which imperialism has plunged Iraq since 2003. We salute Yanar Mohammed, a fallen comrade, murdered by the reactionary forces she bravely stood up to all her life.]
The Assassination of Yanar Mohammed: When the Voice of Freedom Is Targeted in the Heart of Baghdad
By Nazar Akrawi,
3 March 2026
At dawn on March 2, 2026, Iraqis awoke to shocking news: the assassination of feminist socialist activist Yanar Mohammed inside her home in Baghdad. This was not an ordinary political crime, but a bloody milestone in a long-standing social and class struggle between two opposing projects: a liberationist, egalitarian vision that links women’s emancipation to a comprehensive socialist revolution, and a sectarian capitalist–religious order seeking to reproduce domination in its most brutal and regressive forms.
A Feminist Icon Confronting a Return to the Dark Ages
For more than three decades, Yanar Mohammed stood as one of the most prominent leaders of the liberationist feminist movement in Iraq. As the founder and head of the Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq she did not confine herself to theoretical advocacy. She fought daily battles on the ground: organizing demonstrations, establishing shelters for abused women, and exposing the sectarian patriarchal structure that has governed society and the state since 2003.
She was the only Iraqi socialist feminist activist to deliver a speech on the situation of women in Iraq at the headquarters of the United Nations carrying the voices of Iraqi women to the world and affirming that the women’s question is not an isolated “cultural” or “religious” matter, but a fundamentally social question of liberation.
The Class Roots of the Hostility
From a Marxist perspective, this assassination cannot be understood outside the framework of class struggle. The post-2003 order was not merely a political transition; it was a social re-engineering along sectarian–capitalist lines. Civil and secular structures were dismantled, while political Islam, both Shia and Sunni, rose on the ruins of the state, backed by local and global capital.
This alliance between parasitic capitalism and sectarian religious forces required ideological tools to discipline society:
- Reinforcing male authority within the family.
- Subjugating women in the name of “Sharia” and “identity”.
- Presenting poverty and unemployment as moral fate rather than the result of class exploitation.
From this context emerges the intense hatred toward egalitarian ideas. The call for women’s liberation effectively undermines the patriarchal structure that sustains the reproduction of the class system. The call for socialism directly threatens property, privilege, and power.
The Battle Against the Jaafari Personal Status Law
Yanar Mohammed was at the forefront of those who confronted the so-called Jaafari Personal Status Law, which would have permitted the marriage of girls as young as nine and restricted mothers’ rights to custody and divorce. She did not see it as a mere legal amendment, but as a patriarchal and class assault on the bodies of poor girls in particular—who are most often forced into child marriages that perpetuate poverty and dependency.
Her position provoked a fierce campaign against her by influential Shiite religious forces, which filed multiple lawsuits accusing her of “opposing Sharia.” She insisted, however, that women’s liberation cannot be achieved within sectarian legal frameworks, but only through a secular civil state aligned with the working classes.
A Principled Stand Against Militias and ISIS
During the expansion of sectarian militias and the rise of ISIS, Yanar Mohammed adopted a principled stance against both, considering them two faces of the same reactionary violence. She refused to be deceived by sectarian “resistance” slogans and rejected the blackmail of fear in the name of fighting terrorism. At the last conference of her organization, she reaffirmed her rejection of the militarization of society, stressing that women’s weapons are organization and consciousness—not alignment with new repressive axes of power.
The Struggle Over Women’s Shelters
One of her fiercest battles was the defense of shelters for abused women and girls. Sectarian authorities and Shiite militias repeatedly demanded that these shelters be handed over to the state or shut down under the pretext of “protecting morality.” Yanar categorically refused, arguing that returning women fleeing domestic violence to a complicit authority was tantamount to a death sentence.
The issue became the subject of prolonged legal disputes, yet she continued to operate the shelters despite threats, affirming that protecting women is a revolutionary duty before it is an act of charity.
Why So Much Hatred?
The hatred harbored by the sectarian capitalist order and religious parties, particularly Islamist Shiite forces toward Yanar Mohammed and others like her was not personal. It was class fear:
- Fear of a feminist consciousness that links women’s oppression to capitalist exploitation.
- Fear of an independent women’s movement that refuses to be subordinated to ruling parties.
- Fear of a socialist project that exposes sectarianism as a tool for dividing the working class.
When an activist links women’s liberation to socialist revolution, she is not calling for partial reforms, but for a radical alternative. That is what structures of domination cannot tolerate.
A Legacy That Cannot Be Assassinated
The assassination of Yanar Mohammed was an attempt to terrorize women and silence the socialist feminist voice. Yet, in the balance of history, it reveals the fragility of a system that fears a woman whose only weapons were words and organization.
Yanar Mohammed will remain a global icon of liberationist feminist struggle and a symbol of linking women’s emancipation to class struggle. In an Iraq exhausted by sectarianism and corruption, the question remains: can women’s liberation be achieved without the liberation of society as a whole from exploitation?
Her life offered a clear answer: there is no genuine equality without socialism, and no freedom for women within a system founded on class and sectarian oppression.
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