In a sun-baked cemetery in northern Iraq, silence lingers over a forsaken corner devoid of mourners, where women killed in gender-based violence rest in unmarked graves.
Domestic violence and femicide have long plagued Iraq's conservative society, including through so-called "honor killings" — the murders of women deemed to have breached patriarchal social norms, often at the hands of close relatives.
In the unmarked section of the Siwan cemetery in Sulaimaniyah, the second city of the autonomous Kurdistan region, many of the headstones are blank.
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