Leyla Qasim: The Kurdish Martyr Who Refused to Beg (1952–1974)
- Rezan Babakir
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
On 12 May 1974, in a prison courtyard in Baghdad, a twenty-two-year-old Kurdish student from Khanaqin was hanged by the Ba'ath regime for her political activities. Her name was Leyla Qasim. She was the first woman to be publicly executed in Iraq for political crimes, and she had refused, at every stage of the process that led to her death — her arrest, her interrogation, her trial, her imprisonment — to express remorse or appeal for mercy. She died shouting slogans for Kurdistan. She died with the same defiance with which she had lived. Leyla Qasim is remembered in Kurdish culture as the martyr who refused to beg: a young woman whose courage in the face of state murder became one of the most powerful symbols of Kurdish national consciousness in the twentieth century.
Table of Contents
Part 1: Khanaqin — The Borderland That Made Her
Leyla Qasim was born in 1952 in Khanaqin, a predominantly Kurdish town in the Diyala Province of Iraq, near the Iranian border. Khanaqin sits in a region where Kurdish, Arab, Turkmen, and Iranian cultural influences intersect — a borderland that has historically produced people with a sharp consciousness of identity and its politics. The town's Kurdish population had lived through the full range of Ba'athist policies toward Kurds: Arabisation campaigns, economic marginalisation, restriction of cultural expression, and the periodic military campaigns in the Kurdish mountains to the north. Leyla Qasim grew up in this environment, and it shaped her.
Part 2: Baghdad University and Political Awakening
Leyla Qasim came to Baghdad University as a student of political science in the early 1970s. Baghdad's universities in this period were simultaneously the centres of Ba'ath Party political control — students were expected to join the Ba'ath Party student union and demonstrate ideological loyalty — and the sites of considerable underground political activity, as Kurdish, communist, and other opposition students maintained clandestine networks. Leyla Qasim became involved in Kurdish student political activism, linking up with the underground networks that maintained connections to the Kurdish national movement despite the Ba'ath state's intense security apparatus.
Part 3: The Kurdish Student Movement in Ba'athist Iraq
The period of the early 1970s was an ambiguous one for the Kurdish political movement in Iraq. The March Manifesto of 1970 had created apparent hope of genuine Kurdish autonomy under the Ba'ath government, but by 1973 it was becoming clear that the government had no intention of honouring the agreement fully. The Kurdish Democratic Party under Mustafa Barzani was preparing for renewed military confrontation. In the cities, including Baghdad, Kurdish students and intellectuals were caught between the surface normalisation implied by the March Manifesto and the deep certainty that the Ba'athist state's promises to the Kurds were not to be trusted. The underground Kurdish student movement that Leyla Qasim joined reflected this political reality: clandestine, networked, aware that the surface accommodation with the Ba'ath was temporary.
Part 4: Arrest and the Ba'ath Security State
Leyla Qasim was arrested by Ba'athist security forces in 1974, when she was twenty-one years old. The charges against her related to her participation in the Kurdish student movement and, specifically, to alleged involvement in a plan to assassinate the Iranian ambassador to Iraq — a plan that, whatever its actual status, reflected the Ba'ath government's desire to connect Kurdish nationalism to Iranian interference in Iraqi affairs. The interrogation and detention process subjected her to the standard treatment of the Ba'athist security apparatus: isolation, psychological pressure, and the full machinery of a one-party security state.
Part 5: The Trial — A Kangaroo Court
Leyla Qasim's trial was conducted by the Ba'athist Revolutionary Court, a special tribunal that operated outside the ordinary legal system and was designed to deliver politically determined verdicts. She was convicted and sentenced to death. Accounts of her conduct throughout the proceedings — her arrest, her trial, her time awaiting execution — are consistent in describing a young woman who refused to perform the regime's script: she did not recant her Kurdish nationalism, did not appeal to the mercy of the government that had sentenced her, did not show the signs of fear and submission that Ba'athist show trials were designed to produce. She maintained her position with a composure that transformed her, in Kurdish cultural memory, from a political prisoner into a figure of dignity and resistance.
Part 6: The Execution — She Refused to Beg
On 12 May 1974, Leyla Qasim was hanged at Baghdad's central prison alongside four male Kurdish activists. She was twenty-two years old — the youngest of the five and the only woman. According to accounts passed through Kurdish oral tradition and subsequently documented by writers and journalists, she went to her death shouting slogans for Kurdistan. The regime's expectation — that a young woman, facing the gallows, would break, would appeal for mercy, would provide the spectacle of Kurdish nationalist collapse that the Ba'ath government wanted — was not met. She refused to beg. This refusal, and the manner of her death, entered Kurdish cultural memory almost immediately as one of its defining stories.
Part 7: The Kurdish Response — A Martyr Is Made
The response to Leyla Qasim's execution in the Kurdish political and cultural world was immediate and enduring. Kurdish poets wrote elegies for her. Her image — a young woman, bright-faced, twenty-two years old — circulated in the diaspora and among the underground networks of the Kurdish movements in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. She became one of the most reproduced figures in Kurdish nationalist iconography. The combination of her youth, her gender, her courage, and the particular barbarity of her execution — a state executing a twenty-two-year-old student woman for her beliefs — gave her story a particular emotional and political power that has sustained its resonance for five decades.
Part 8: Women and Kurdish National Identity
Leyla Qasim's place in Kurdish national memory is inseparable from her gender. Kurdish women have participated in the national movement since its earliest manifestations, as fighters, organisers, poets, and political leaders — but the political and cultural structures of Kurdish nationalism have not always given them equal recognition. Leyla Qasim's martyrdom broke through this pattern in a way that no political programme could have engineered. She became, simply, the Kurdish woman who had faced the state's ultimate violence with more courage than many men had shown. Her memory has been invoked by Kurdish women's political movements across the entire Kurdish world — from the YPJ in Syria to the women's organisations of the KRG to the feminist networks of the diaspora — as the founding martyrdom of Kurdish women's political engagement.
Part 9: Legacy — The Name That Lives in Every Struggle
Leyla Qasim was twenty-two years old when she was hanged. She had been politically active for perhaps three or four years. By any measure of output — writings, speeches, organisational achievements — she had done very little. And yet she is one of the most significant figures in Kurdish political memory, remembered across the entire Kurdish world and the diaspora, invoked in contexts that range from feminist political organisation to armed resistance. This disproportionate significance — the gap between the brevity of her active life and the permanence of her legacy — is explained by the manner of her death. It was not what she had done that made her a symbol; it was how she died. She died refusing to concede the legitimacy of the regime that killed her. She died insisting on her Kurdish identity in the face of a state that denied that identity existed. She died with a courage that became, for subsequent generations, a standard of what Kurdish commitment to the national cause looked like at its most pure.
Chronology of Leyla Qasim
1952 — Born in Khanaqin, Diyala Province, Iraq.
Early 1970s — Student of political science at Baghdad University; becomes involved in Kurdish underground student politics.
1974 — Arrested by Ba'athist security forces; charged with involvement in Kurdish nationalist activities.
1974 — Tried before the Ba'athist Revolutionary Court; convicted and sentenced to death.
12 May 1974 — Executed by hanging in Baghdad at the age of twenty-two; the first woman publicly executed for political crimes in Iraq.
Post-1974 — Becomes one of the most enduring martyrdom figures in Kurdish political culture, invoked by movements across the entire Kurdish world.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Who was Leyla Qasim?
Leyla Qasim (1952–1974) was a Kurdish student from Khanaqin, Iraq, who was executed by the Ba'ath regime in Baghdad on 12 May 1974 at the age of twenty-two for her involvement in Kurdish nationalist political activity. She was the first woman to be publicly executed for political crimes in Iraq and became one of the most enduring martyrdom figures in Kurdish political memory.
Why is Leyla Qasim so significant in Kurdish memory?
Her significance derives primarily from the manner of her death: she refused to beg for mercy, refused to recant her Kurdish nationalism, and died shouting slogans for Kurdistan. The combination of her youth, her gender, and her courage in the face of state execution gave her story a power that has sustained its cultural resonance for five decades. She is invoked by Kurdish women's movements across the entire Kurdish world as the founding martyrdom of Kurdish women's political engagement.
What were the political circumstances of her execution?
She was executed in May 1974, the year when the Ba'ath government's March Manifesto agreement with the Kurds finally collapsed and renewed military operations in the Kurdish north were imminent. The regime was actively suppressing Kurdish political activity in Baghdad's universities, and Leyla Qasim was among those caught in this crackdown. Her execution was part of a broader campaign of political violence against Kurdish activists in the cities that accompanied the military campaign against Barzani's peshmerga in the mountains.
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