Mournful members of Iraq's Armenian Christian population bowed their heads and recited the Lord's Prayer over an altar of burning incense at a funeral here on Wednesday for two Armenian women killed by private security contractors, the second such fatal shooting in less than a month.
Relatives also called for justice on Wednesday, though security contractors are immune from prosecution under Iraqi law.
For the family of at least one of the women killed, a taxi driver who was shot in the head as her car was struck with bullets while approaching a security convoy on Tuesday, the grief extended well beyond the borders of Iraq.
The woman, Marany Awanees, was the youngest of nine siblings in the Mamook family, including three brothers who are part of the Armenian diaspora in Europe and the US. One brother is a computer programmer living in Glendale, California, near Los Angeles.
The Mamook family, like so many other Armenian families, now straddles the boundaries between the West and the family's Middle Eastern roots.
"She was a lovely sister, my younger sister, a lovely, lovely sister," another brother, Paul Mamook, an electrical engineer in Belfast, Northern Ireland, said in a telephone interview.
Relatives in Iraq described Awanees as a quiet and pious woman with few friends or interests other than her church and close ties to her siblings. She had taken to working as a taxi driver for fellow Armenians two years ago, after her husband died, to support two of her daughters, who are in college. The third is in high school.
Paul Mamook said he called his sister after a Sept. 16 shooting by guards with Blackwater USA that killed as many as 17 people who were stuck in traffic near Nisour Square in Baghdad. The shooting struck fear in him, he said, because Awanees was a taxi driver.
"I phoned her, and I said, `Whenever you drive, watch and check, and be very careful,'" he said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. "But I never expected it to happen to her."
In Baghdad, another brother, Albert Mamook, said the guards should be tried for murder.
"The killers must be punished," he said.
The shooting, he said, was unprovoked: "We have no enemies. We just work, and we want our rights. We have a right to justice."
Awanees' white Oldsmobile was riddled by automatic gunfire in the Karada neighborhood of Baghdad on Tuesday afternoon. Her front-seat passenger, Jeniva Jalal, 30, was also killed; a woman and a boy in the back seat survived, witnesses and local police officials said.
The guards involved in the shooting on Tuesday were working for Unity Resources Group, an Australian-run security company registered in Singapore and with headquarters in Dubai.
The people they were assigned to protect worked under contract for the US Agency for International Development.
‘EYE FOR AN EYE’: Two of the men were shot by a male relative of the victims, whose families turned down the opportunity to offer them amnesty, the Supreme Court said Four men were yesterday publicly executed in Afghanistan, the Supreme Court said, the highest number of executions to be carried out in one day since the Taliban’s return to power. The executions in three separate provinces brought to 10 the number of men publicly put to death since 2021, according to an Agence France-Presse tally. Public executions were common during the Taliban’s first rule from 1996 to 2001, with most of them carried out publicly in sports stadiums. Two men were shot around six or seven times by a male relative of the victims in front of spectators in Qala-i-Naw, the center
Incumbent Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa on Sunday claimed a runaway victory in the nation’s presidential election, after voters endorsed the young leader’s “iron fist” approach to rampant cartel violence. With more than 90 percent of the votes counted, the National Election Council said Noboa had an unassailable 12-point lead over his leftist rival Luisa Gonzalez. Official results showed Noboa with 56 percent of the vote, against Gonzalez’s 44 percent — a far bigger winning margin than expected after a virtual tie in the first round. Speaking to jubilant supporters in his hometown of Olon, the 37-year-old president claimed a “historic victory.” “A huge hug
Two Belgian teenagers on Tuesday were charged with wildlife piracy after they were found with thousands of ants packed in test tubes in what Kenyan authorities said was part of a trend in trafficking smaller and lesser-known species. Lornoy David and Seppe Lodewijckx, two 19-year-olds who were arrested on April 5 with 5,000 ants at a guest house, appeared distraught during their appearance before a magistrate in Nairobi and were comforted in the courtroom by relatives. They told the magistrate that they were collecting the ants for fun and did not know that it was illegal. In a separate criminal case, Kenyan Dennis
The US will help bolster the Philippines’ arsenal and step up joint military exercises, Manila’s defense chief said, as tensions between Washington and China escalate. The longtime US ally is expecting a sustained US$500 million in annual defense funding from Washington through 2029 to boost its military capabilities and deter China’s “aggression” in the region, Philippine Secretary of Defense Gilberto Teodoro said in an interview in Manila on Thursday. “It is a no-brainer for anybody, because of the aggressive behavior of China,” Teodoro said on close military ties with the US under President Donald Trump. “The efforts for deterrence, for joint resilience
RSS