A 20-year-old student was crowned Miss Iraq in the first pageant to be held in the country in 43 years, but the win was overshadowed by numerous threats that prompted some contestants to drop out.
The pageant website and its Facebook page were slammed with death threats against contestants, prompting the field of nearly 200 to drop to less than 10.
But Shaima Qassem Abdelrahman, an economics major at the University of Kirkuk, was still hailed for her win.
“Iraq needed this,” pageant director Ahmed Leith told CNN. “The situation is weak here, and we wanted to celebrate this the same way other countries like Lebanon and others do. To have a sense of normalcy.”
Abdelrahman said she had something to prove.
“I want to prove that the Iraqi woman has her own existence in society, she has her rights like men,” she told NBC. “I am afraid of nothing, because I am confident that what I am doing is not wrong.”
She noted she had to convince her parents to let her enter because they initially banned her from participating.
“In the past I heard that such contests used to be held in Baghdad — I dreamed of being a part of one of these contests,” she said.
Abdelrahman has been directly affected by the ongoing violence in the country in part perpetrated by terror group ISIS--two of her cousins, working as federal police, were killed while fighting the militants.
