Shafaq News
A 19-year-old Kurdish fighter survived an IRGC drone strike on al-Sulaymaniyah border camp —then died after multiple hospitals turned her away. Her case has exposed fault lines in the KRG's medical institutions, its obligations under international humanitarian law, and its unresolved relationship with the Iranian Kurdish armed opposition.
The drone struck the Surdash camp belonging to the Komala Iranian Kurdish opposition group at the Sulaymaniyah border on 14 April, in what the HANA human rights organization described as an operation carried out under an active two-week ceasefire —a violation, by their account, of an agreement that had briefly quieted one of the region's most persistent flashpoints.
Ghazal Mulan, 19, a member of the Komala Party of Kurdistan, was among those wounded. Two others were injured in the same strike.
She did not die from the drone. That distinction matters, and it is the reason her case has reverberated through Kurdish civil society for days, drawing statements from intellectuals, lawyers, women's rights advocates, and a Kurdish politician who ultimately buried her himself.
What followed the strike —the hours between injury and death— is contested in its detail but not, at its core, in its outcome. Ghazal Mulan passed through at least four medical facilities in al-Sulaymaniyah. She received first aid at Shorsh Hospital, a public facility affiliated with the Kurdistan Region's Peshmerga health directorate. Still, because she did not receive the intensive care her injuries required, she died.
The Woman Behind The Case
Ghazal Mulan Shabarabadi was born in Bukan, a city in Iran's West Azerbaijan province with a dense Kurdish population and a long history of political resistance. She had been living in Mahabad, another city in the same province that carries particular weight in Kurdish memory as the capital of the short-lived Republic of Mahabad in 1946 —the first modern Kurdish state, which survived less than a year before Iranian forces crushed it.
She joined Komala in December 2025, according to a senior party official who spoke to Shafaq News on condition of anonymity. She had been active in political and women's rights work before enlisting. In the party's Peshmerga, the armed wing of an organization that has operated from bases in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq for decades, she found a structure for that engagement.
Women have long held frontline and leadership roles across Kurdish armed movements. From the Peshmerga forces of the Kurdistan Regional Government to the Syrian Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) and their all-female counterpart, the YPJ, Kurdish military culture has, more than most in the region, integrated women into combat roles not as a symbolic gesture but as an operational reality. Ghazal's path was consistent with a tradition that predates her by generations —young Kurdish women from Iranian cities crossing into Iraq to join parties their governments have spent decades trying to eliminate.
She had been in the Peshmerga's ranks for roughly four months when the drone found her.
The Hospital Sequence
What happened next is the subject of competing accounts that the Kurdistan Regional Government's Ministry of Health has now formally pledged to investigate.
According to Komala, Ghazal was transported in the critical hours after the strike to several medical facilities in al-Sulaymaniyah province. Shorsh Hospital provided initial first aid but lacked the intensive care capacity required by the severity of her wounds. Her companions then attempted to secure admission at Baxshin Hospital and Asia International Hospital (AIH), both private facilities. Neither accepted her, and she died upon arrival at Faruk Medical City.
AIH Hospital has categorically denied this account. In a press conference, hospital representatives stated that Ghazal was never brought to their facility as a patient and that no telephone contact was made with them on her behalf. The hospital said any association of its name with the case was unacceptable.
Baxshin Hospital, in an initial statement, said the facility lacked an intensive care unit and cited the absence of a formal police report —a requirement, they said, under al-Sulaymaniyah Health Directorate guidelines for cases with security or legal dimensions. In a subsequent press conference, however, the account shifted: hospital officials said they had been actively working the phones to obtain authorization from the relevant authorities, and that Ghazal's companions had left the facility before that authorization came through. They said they contacted the companions and told them to return, and that they did not.
The Kurdish Ministry of Health, in an official statement, did not endorse either private hospital's account, pointing out that after Ghazal was transferred from Shorsh —a Peshmerga-affiliated public hospital— to Baxshin, "the necessary medical procedures were not carried out and she was not admitted, which led to her death." The ministry announced a formal investigation under Patient Rights Law No. 4 of 2020 and Investigation Instructions No. 16 of 2022, with both the al-Sulaymaniyah Health Directorate and the public prosecutor's office directed to pursue the case.
A Question Of Medical Neutrality
The legal frame around this case is not, strictly speaking, complicated, which is part of what makes the institutional response so difficult to defend.
The Geneva Conventions, to which Iraq is a signatory, establish a foundational principle: the wounded must be treated without discrimination based on identity, political affiliation, or party to a conflict. Refusing treatment to a critically injured person in an emergency setting constitutes, under this framework, a serious violation, one that legal scholars say can rise to criminal liability in some jurisdictions.
Iraq's domestic law reinforces this. The KRG's own Patient Rights Law, now being invoked in the investigation, is consistent with international standards: no patient in a life-threatening condition may be refused.
Al-Sulaymaniyah lawyer Rizan Dlir, speaking to Shafaq News, placed the responsibility squarely on the institutions involved. "The lawyers will follow this case to determine the specific duties of hospitals in emergencies," she said, adding that the burden of establishing the truth falls on the relevant authorities.
Rahman Gharib, coordinator of the Metro Centre for Journalists' Rights and Advocacy, went further, calling what occurred a violation of core medical ethics, one, he added, that sits poorly with the Kurdistan Region's self-presentation as an open and welcoming territory for refugees and displaced populations.
The "police report" requirement cited by Baxshin Hospital sits at the center of the legal dispute. Kurdish politician Sardar Abdullah, who took it upon himself to arrange Ghazal's burial after no institutional mechanism stepped in to do so, was direct: "Demanding a police report to treat a war-wounded fighter is an unacceptable excuse. War-wounded are treated everywhere, regardless of their affiliations." He described her as like a daughter and called his involvement a moral and national obligation —the minimum owed to someone who had received less than any other fallen fighter would ordinarily receive.
The Politics Underneath
The Surdash camp, and others like it across northern Iraq, have been the sites of recurring Iranian strikes for years. The camps house members of Iranian Kurdish opposition parties —Komala, the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (KDPI), and others— who have operated from Iraqi Kurdish territory since the 1980s. Tehran views them as security threats; Baghdad has faced sustained pressure to dismantle them; the KRG has historically occupied an uncomfortable middle position, providing implicit tolerance without formal endorsement.
HANA's description of the April 14 strike as a ceasefire violation adds a specific layer: the attack came during a negotiated pause, which, if accurate, signals either a deliberate decision to act regardless of commitments or a breakdown in the ceasefire's terms. Neither interpretation is reassuring.
The Komala official who spoke to Shafaq News declined to rule out a political dimension to the hospital refusals, saying that motivations of a "political or ideological nature cannot be excluded." That is an allegation, not a finding, and it must be treated as such. But it is also not an implausible allegation in a political environment where KRG institutions operate under sustained Iranian pressure, where the legal status of opposition fighters in the Region is ambiguous, and where private hospitals make risk calculations that are not purely medical.
Tanya Tahir, an academic at the University of Sulaimani, offered a more structural reading. Women dying in the Kurdish struggle is not new, she told Shafaq News, “but the behavior of some health institutions in this case was alien to the culture of al-Sulaymaniyah." She cautioned against politicizing the case or allowing it to be weaponized in factional disputes. Those who come from eastern Kurdistan, she said, are "on their own land and should not be treated as guests."
After Death
The complications did not end with Ghazal's death. The Komala official told Shafaq News that several mosques declined to receive her body for funeral rites, citing religious grounds —specifically, that a woman cannot be washed within a mosque. In Islamic tradition, the ritual washing of the body, known as Ghusl, is a religious obligation before burial, performed by same-sex attendants in a designated space. The official acknowledged that alternatives existed; the washing could have been completed in a private home, a common and accepted practice, but “these arrangements were never made."
Kurdish Islamic scholar and writer Idris Karitani described the episode as a departure from both religious values and human decency. He invoked examples from the Prophet Mohammad's biography, affirming the dignity of the human person regardless of identity, and called what happened to Ghazal "a mark of shame that will be difficult to erase."
Sardar Abdullah, the politician who arranged the burial, framed it plainly: “She deserved what any fighter receives. She did not receive it. So I stepped in.”.
The collective statement signed by Kurdish intellectuals, artists, and civil society figures called for a transparent and urgent judicial investigation, with findings made public. Accountability in cases like this is not just about one fighter from Bukan. It is about what the Kurdistan Region's institutions owe to the people —fighters, civilians, refugees— who pass through them in moments of crisis.
Ghazal Mulan spent four months in the military before an Iranian drone struck her camp. She spent a shorter time than that moving between hospitals that could not, or would not, save her. The investigation will determine which of those verbs applies. The answer will say something significant about the Region's institutions —and about the distance, still, between the Kurdistan Region's self-image and its practice.
Written and edited by Shafaq News staff.