The video is shaky, but the brutality is clear. A slender, black-haired girl is dragged in a headlock through a mob of men. Within seconds, she is on the ground in a fetal position, covering her head in a futile attempt to fend off a shower of stones.

Someone slams a concrete block onto the back of her head. The girl stops moving, but the kicks and the rocks keep coming, as do the victorious shouts of the men delivering them.

In the eyes of many in her community in northern Iraq, 17-year-old Duaa Khalil Aswad's crime was to love a boy from another religion. She was a Yazidi, a member of an insular religious sect. He was a Sunni Muslim. To her uncle and cousins, that was reason enough to put her to death last month in the village of Bashiqa.

Women's groups say the video shows Iraq's backward slide as religious and ethnic intolerance takes hold.

"There is a new Taliban controlling the lives of women in Iraq," said Hana Edwar, the leader of the Amal Organization for Women, a nongovernmental group in Baghdad. "I think this story will be absolutely repeated again. I believe if security is not controlled, such stories will be very common."

The case has far broader dimensions in Iraq, where anger arising from it points to the ethnic, religious and sectarian discord that colors virtually every issue here. That anger has been fueled by release of the video images, made with someone's cellular phone, on the internet.

Kurds, who include Yazidis, suspect Sunni Arabs of circulating the gruesome images to fuel anger against Yazidis and undermine the Kurdish community.

"It seems they are trying to make it big for political purposes," said Mohsen Gargari, a Kurdish member of parliament.

In an interview, he and two other Kurdish lawmakers condemned Duaa's killing. But they noted that in February a Sunni woman had been killed by relatives for having a relationship with a Yazidi man.

"Nobody talked about it. Nobody filmed it or turned it into a big issue," he said.

In a report released last month, the United Nations said so-called "honor killings" of women were on the rise in Iraq. In January and February alone, according to the report, at least 40 women had been killed for alleged "immoral conduct," which can range from sitting in a car with a man who is not a relative to having an adulterous affair.

Unlike Duaa's death, none was known to have caused revenge attacks, much less political sniping.

Two weeks after the April 7 stoning, gunmen dragged more than 20 Yazidi men off a bus in the northern city of Mosul, about 20 miles south of Bashiqa, lined them up against a wall and gunned them down. The next day, a Sunni insurgent group linked to al-Qaida claimed responsibility for a car bombing that targeted the offices of a Kurdish political party in northern Iraq, saying it was to avenge the death of Duaa.

Yazidi college students have fled the university in Mosul, home to a large Yazidi community, for fear of being attacked.

Many Yazidis, as well as non-Yazidi Kurds, are convinced that the circulation of the video is part of a plot to drive a wedge in the Kurdish community of northern Iraq. They say it would hamper the ability of Kurds to pass a referendum planned later this year on autonomy for some northern areas. Sunni Arabs oppose Kurdish autonomy and oppose holding the referendum.

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