A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Rand Abdel-Qadar, the 17-year-old Iraqi girl murdered by her own family for speaking to a British soldier. Her brothers held her down while her father stabbed and suffocated her. The police congratulated him for maintaining his honor.

Two weeks after Rand’s death, her mother Leila—her arm broken from her husband’s latest beating—did something few Iraqi women dare: she left, seeking refuge with a small women’s organization in Basra. She spent the next few weeks shuttling between houses, never staying more than four days in one place. Plans were made to ferry her to Jordan, where an Iraqi family had promised to take her in.

The night before her departure, Leila was too excited to sleep, so she got up early to bake a date cake to thank the women helping her escape. As she left the house with two of them, a car pulled up. The gunman fired five shots, striking Leila three times. She died that afternoon.

According to the Observer, one of the women injured with her reported, “I could hear people talking on the [hospital] corridors and the only thing that they had to say was that Leila was wrong for defending her daughter’s mistakes and that her death was God’s punishment.”

Police claim that the shooting was unrelated to Leila’s decision to divorce her husband. They blame a sectarian attack, speculating that the assailant intended to kill the activists instead. But either prospect adds a grim coda to an already tragic story.

A father kills his child for practicing English with a Westerner and hears atta-boy from the cops. His abused wife can’t leave and others can’t help her without risking their lives. Still we hear that universal values will prevail, that a mini-America is struggling to be born in Mesopotamia, and that any who doubt it hate freedom. Two fresh graves argue otherwise.