On this date in 1974, Kurdish activist Leyla Qasim was hanged by the Ba’ath regime in Baghdad.

A middle daughter among four brothers from the heavily Kurdish Khanaqin district, Qasim joined the Kurdish Student Union as a student at Baghdad University in the early 1970s.

The Iraqi government had fought a running war against Kurdish rebels throughout the 1960s, resolved only by a tenuous truce; by the spring of 1974 armed conflict began again.

Visible Kurdish activists living right in the capital became a natural target.

Qasim and four male companions were arrested in late April, accused of plotting against Iraq (various accounts have this down to a hijacking scheme or cogitating the murder of Saddam Hussein). They were tortured, condemned in a televised trial, and executed together.

She purportedly gave her family the last words of a proper martyr: “I am going to be [the] Bride of Kurdistan and embrace it.”

She’s still regarded as a Kurdish heroine and many families confer her name on their daughters.

On this day..

• 1944: Oskar Kusch, Wehrkraftzersetzung U-boat commander
• 1899: Claude Branton, gallows photograph
• 1775: William Pitman, for murdering his slave
• 1868: Robert Smith, the last publicly hanged in Scotland
• 1543: Jakob Karrer, Vesalius subject
• 1625: Not Helene Gillet, beheading survivor
• 1936: Buck Ruxton, red stains
• 1388: Three evil counselors of Richard II
• 1730: James Dalton, Hogarth allusion
• 1641: Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford
• 1993: Leonel Herrera, perilously close to simple murder?
• 1916: James Connolly, socialist revolutionary