Rome, 28 April 2024 – A murder of pure fundamentalist origin to put an end to alleged “scandal” of videos on TikTok. Or a murder that wants to shut the mouth of a girl accused by a rival of having an affair with an important government official. It has many dark aspects the murder of Om Fahadreal name Ghufran Sawadi, Iraqi influencer with half a million followers. What is certain is that on Friday evening an unknown person shot and killed her while she was sitting in the car in front of her house, in the Zayouna neighborhood of Baghdad.
The videos of surveillance cameras they resumed the attack: the attacker arrived alone on a motorbike, wearing dark clothes and a helmet, got out, looked from behind a wall towards Om Fahad’s SUV parked a short distance away, then headed towards the black car of her, opened the door and fired. The influencer died instantly and another girl who was with her in the car was injured. After the killing, the Iraqi Interior Ministry said it had established a team of investigators to investigate the circumstances of the murder. Om Fahad on social media was known for sharing videos in which she danced to Iraqi pop music, wearing tight clothing, performances that generated more than a million views. But all that notoriety in a society where civil liberties for women remain limited has evidently also created enemies for her.
In February 2023 Om had been sentenced to six months in prison by a court which had ruled that his videos contained “indecent speech that undermined public decency and morality”. The ruling came just a month after Baghdad’s Interior Ministry launched a committee to discover “obscene and degrading content”. Did anyone go further and physically remove the scandal? It is the most probable hypothesis. After all, it is not the first murder of an influencer in Iraq. Last September Noor Alsaffar, a 23-year-old TikToker followed on social media by hundreds of thousands of people was shot dead. Five years earlier, in 2018, it was the turn of Tara Fares, a 22-year-old model.
But it’s there also another possibility. My colleague Dalia Naeem, who presented herself as the Iraqi Barbie due to her face distorted by numerous plastic surgeries, in a feud between influencers she had threatened to report an alleged relationship between Om alias Ghufran and a high-ranking Iraqi official. Maybe he wanted to avoid the scandal with gunshots?
