A man shot dead on Friday the famous Iraqi tiktoker, Om Fahad – her real name is Ghufran Sawadi, sentenced last year to prison for sharing content considered “indecent” that already violated Iraqi “morals and traditions”.
The assailant, who has not been identified, got off a motorcycle and walked up to the woman on foot and shot her while she was parked in her car in front of her house on a central street in Baghdad, two police officers told AFP on condition of anonymity. . Another security official, also on condition of anonymity, told Reuters that the attacker pretended to be delivering food before shooting Om Fahad.
“Investigations are still ongoing and are in their infancy,” the Iraqi Interior Ministry said in a statement this Saturday. In the same letter, he reported the creation of “a specialized committee to find out the circumstances of the murder of a well-known woman on social networks at the hands of unknown assailants,” according to several agencies.
Om Fahad became famous, in a largely conservative and patriarchal Iraq, for her videos posted on TikTok and Instagram in which she often appeared in tight clothing, swaying to the rhythm of Iraqi music.
In February 2023, a correctional court first sentenced Om Fahad to six months in prison for “the publication of several videos with indecent content that violated public morals and customs.”
The Ministry of the Interior recently created an administrative “squad” with the aim of tracking “decadent content” on social networks and video platforms that went “against the customs and traditions” of Iraqi society.
To carry out this attack on freedom of expression, a website was activated so that users could report these publications. Following the Government’s action, several influencers were sentenced to prison or were forced to apologize for the content they published, mostly “humorous” or with a “satirical” tone.
In 2018, Suad al Ali, human rights activist and director of the organization Al Uid Alaiami, Tara Farès, influencer and model were murdered in cold blood by a man in Basra and Baghdad, respectively.
