When news of Aswad's murder surfaced last month, it triggered an apparent revenge attack.
On April 23, gunmen stopped a bus carrying workers from her community, dragged out 23 Yazidis and shot them dead in vengeance for what they saw as the murder of a Muslim convert.
Last week the United Nations' quarterly report on human rights in Iraq expressed serious concern over a rise in "honour killings" of women deemed to have betrayed their families in Kurdish Iraq.
Living mainly in northern Iraq, the 500,000 Yazidis speak a dialect of Kurdish but follow a pre-Islamic religion and have their own cultural traditions.
They believe in God the creator and respect the Biblical and Koranic prophets, especially Abraham, but their main focus of worship is Malak Taus, the chief of the archangels, often represented by a peacock.
Followers of other religions know this angel as Lucifer or Satan, leading to popular prejudice that the secretive Yazidis are devil-worshippers.
Nevertheless, the community has survived for centuries alongside its Muslim and Christian neighbours. Now, however, with sectarian war gripping much of Iraq, Sunni Muslim extremists have begun to threaten them.
