Eleven years after the assassination of Sardasht Osman, his father still grieves and waits for justice

PEREGRAF– Farman Sadiq

His father remains disconsolate after more than a decade of grief. He visits his son’s grave every Thursday with his wife and says with a deep breath of sadness: "We only ask for the discovery and punishment of Sardasht's killers and we will not forgive the bloodshed."

Wednesday was the eleventh anniversary of the assassination of journalist Sardasht Osman. As Sardasht's father spoke to PEREGRAF at the graveside of his murdered child, the sadness was visible on his face even after all the years that have passed since Sardasht never returned home. From time to time, he breathed deeply, bearing the weight of the tragedy that struck his family.

"Sardasht was a silent boy. He didn’t even go out with the neighbor boys. He came to work with me all the time after doing his homework, so I loved him more than anyone else. Even our neighbors didn't know Sardasht," said Mam Osman.

"Maybe I did bad, but not Sardasht," he added.

May 3, 2010 was the last day Sardasht and his family were together. That morning his brother took him to Salahaddin University's Language College in the capital Erbil where Sardasht, 23, was an English student. Sardasht said goodbye as he got out of the car. That was the last time they saw him alive.

After a while, Sardasht was abducted from in front of the university, with several people bundling him into a minibus. Two days later, his body was found in Mosul, shot twice in the head.

The details and manner of his kidnapping in one city and the subsequent discovery of his body in another, many miles and many checkpoints away, have raised dozens of questions that remain unanswered.

"On May 6, we received Sardasht's body and, according to a forensic medical report, he was still alive 48 hours after the kidnapping, meaning he was assassinated on May 5," said Sardasht's brother, Bashdar.

Sardasht is buried in the village of Gardazaban, 42 kilometers from the center of Erbil, on the border with Shamamak district.

"When we come to Sardasht's grave, our hearts are calm," said Sardasht's father.

After the assassination, the authorities floated several unlikely scenarios for how Sardasht had been killed, including by a terrorist group. But their implausibility and the rejection of those explanations by the family led to widespread skepticism of the authorities’ claims on the part of the public.

In fact, the totality of evidence suggests that it was the authorities themselves who are responsible for the murder. As a result, there was widespread outrage, with protests held both inside and outside the Kurdistan Region.

Before his death, Sardasht wrote a satirical poem entitled, "I am in love with Masoud Barzani's daughter," in which he talks about injustice in the Kurdistan Region and how his marriage into the then-president’s family would allow him to escape poverty.

In an article entitled "the first bell of my murder rang," he describes receiving death threats by phone and letter and criticizing the police chief in Erbil for brushing aside concerns about his safety.

His own prescient words adorn his gravestone: "The misfortune of the authority is that it does not care about the death of its descendants."

Bowing to public pressure following the discovery of Sardasht’s body, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) formed an investigative committee, which initially attempted to pin the blame a 38-year-old man named Hisham Mahmood, implausibly claiming that he had killed Sardasht on behalf of al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group Ansar al-Islam.

It was not seen as believable by the public or by Sardasht’s fellow journalists. His family rejected this explanation as an "invented" scenario and called for the formation of an investigative committee, a demand that has never been fulfilled.

"Eleven years ago, at the burial of Sardasht's body, the government's high-ranking institutions promised to find and prosecute the killer. But then the coordination reversed and all the institutions were trying to hide Sardasht's killer and invented delusional killings to present to us and public opinion," Bashdar told PEREGRAF.

"Once again, as we said on the first day after Sardasht's assassination, we will not forgive Sardasht's blood and we have the same demand as on that first day," he continued.

"The murderer of Sardasht and those behind the killing, those who plotted and those who have made accusations against him, should be made a disgrace to us and the people of Kurdistan. They should be tried," he said.

Journalists and activists share the family’s demands for justice for Sardasht and clarity about who is responsible for his murder.

There have not been any large remembrance ceremonies for the last two years, but a number of activists and journalists went to Sardasht’s grave on Wednesday with his family.

For years, the Kurdistan Region has been of claiming that its human rights record is better than the rest of Iraq and neighboring countries like Iran, Turkey, and Syria, but this situation is now trending in the wrong direction, with journalists and activists in serious danger.

Increasingly, international watchdogs are taking notice and have repeatedly urged the authorities to improve.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) Middle East representative Ignacio Miguel Delgado, in the years since Masrour Barzani took office, observers have witnessed a deterioration of press freedom in the Kurdistan Region.

"We have documented an increase in instances of harassment, assault, and detention of journalists covering protests over unpaid salaries for public servants and lack of basic services, as well as the seizure of their equipment," he said.

According to statistics compiled by the Kurdistan Journalists' Syndicate, there were 138 violations involving 315 journalists and media outlets during 2020.

Bahzad Husain, a civil activist, told PEREGRAF that "for eleven years, terrorists imagined that they took a pen away from us. But they are unaware that dozens of braver and sharper pens have come onto the field."

On Wednesday, journalists and activists read a statement at Sardasht's grave, referencing him and the other journalists who have been murdered in the Kurdistan Region.

"They cannot stop us for one moment and we will never forget the assassination of Sardasht, Kawa, Soran, [and] Wadat," the statement said.

"We see it is very possible that the authority has planned to kill and silence the voices of Erbil liberals, with a long-term plan to silence the brave voices of our brothers in Badinan," it added.

One of the harshest aspects of the repression of journalists by the authorities is that there is impunity for rights abusers. None of the killers of journalists in the Kurdistan Region have been put on trial, much less those who ordered the murders.

For Sardasht’s father, he has waited eleven years for an impartial investigation into his son’s murder and for a court to bring justice and relieve his family’s grief and suffering.

"I will not forgive Sardasht's murderers in any way and I have made a will for my boys not to forgive them either," he said.