Prominent Iraqi human rights defender and feminist advocate Yanar Mohammed was killed in an armed attack on her home in Baghdad Monday. Mohammed had reportedly returned to Iraq from Canada a few days before her murder by two unidentified gunmen who opened fire as she stood outside her home. Mohammed was the co-founder and president of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq. In 2003, she founded the first women’s shelter in Iraq to protect women from trafficking and so-called honor killings, becoming the target of death threats over her activism. She was a frequent guest on Democracy Now! following the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. We last spoke to her in 2022, when over two dozen people were killed in Baghdad after armed supporters of the powerful Iraqi cleric Muqtada al-Sadr clashed with government forces.

Yanar Mohammed: “And the strange thing is that those who started the demonstration that led to the clashes, to the killing and to the bombing around the city, nobody dares to challenge them or to speak any bad word against them. It’s as if I’m living the days of Saddam Hussein all over again, where everybody is scared of a single person, and nobody dares to say anything. It’s a terrible situation.”

Yanar Mohammed was killed yesterday. Click here to see all our interviews with her.