Yanar Mohammed, an Iraqi women’s rights activist who co-founded and led the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), was shot and killed outside her home in Baghdad on March 2, 2026. The killing was reported as an assassination. Yanar Mohammed was 65.
Mohammed was known for building protection networks for women in post-2003 Iraq. OWFI operated shelters and safe houses for women facing threats including domestic abuse, so-called honor killings, trafficking, and forced prostitution; a Gruber Foundation press release credited her and the organization with opening shelters in Baghdad and Kirkuk, maintaining additional safe houses, and beginning activist training courses starting in August 2005.
Her organizing began outside Iraq. In 1998, she helped establish the Defense of Iraqi Women’s Rights in Canada and served as its director-coordinator in 1998, 1999, and 2002; the group later changed its name and relocated to Iraq in June 2004 as OWFI, which Mohammed went on to lead.
OWFI’s work combined direct protection with public advocacy. Its programs were described as including shelters, an egalitarian media program that included Al Mousawat (Equality), a newspaper calling for full equality for women that she published and edited, and a Women’s Prisons Watch initiative that documented prison conditions and abuse and campaigned for imprisoned women, including those on death row.
Mohammed received international recognition that included the 2008 Gruber Women’s Rights Prize and the 2016 Rafto Prize. Through OWFI, she linked women’s equality advocacy to practical refuge and sustained monitoring of abuses that threatened women’s lives and freedom.