WHO IS KILLING THE Beauty Queens Of Iraq?
IN a bleak landscape of war and division, 22-year-old Tara Fares seemed to offer an unlikely glimmer of gaiety. She loved fashion, make-up, gossip, dancing, and chronicled her life as a model and beauty queen in a hyperactive social media account.
“Woo-hoo, I’m off to the city,” she wrote in one of her last posts.
The city was Baghdad, and in late September 2018, as Tara drove her white sports car down a narrow street, a man ducked out of a doorway, fired three rounds through the open window and disappeared on the pillion of an accomplice’s motorbike.
Among Tara’s millions of followers, there was no doubt why she had been killed. Iraq's fragile freedoms are being brutally extinguished, and women who defy the harsh new norms are bearing the brunt.
“We are being slaughtered like chickens,” says Tara’s friend and fellow pageant queen, Shimaa Qasim, who has now fled to Jordan. “I was told I would meet the same fate, and I believe it.” Just two days earlier, another well-known Iraqi woman, Soad al-Ali, a glamorous 46-year-old former
