A Kurdish woman asked to be buried “in a handful of soil” in Ireland – but her body was sent to Turkey anyway

This article discusses suicide. If you or somebody you know might need help, Pieta House’s suicide prevention hotline can be contacted 24/7 at 1800 247 247 and the Samaritans’ at 116 123.

On 22 February 2024, Nilay Ateşoğlu was dancing at a baby shower in her asylum centre in Co. Galway, shows a video clip.

At one point, Ayanna Williams is filming her goofing around with something stuffed under her jumper.

She’s slim, wearing a short black skirt over her crimson-coloured tights. Her dark hair is curled into a messy bun.

Williams jokes about fake boobs, and they break into a laugh. “She was a very bubbly person,” said Williams last week on a video call.

On 8 November 2024, Williams watched as Ateşoğlu slid by her with a rucksack and slipped out of their centre.

She looked like she was in a dark mood. Williams decided against saying hello, she said. “And that was the last time I saw her.”

Ateşoğlu’s body was found below the towering Cliffs of Moher in County Clare on 9 November. It was her 29th birthday.

A handwritten letter in Turkish, dated 7 November 2024, sat on a desk in her room. At the top, it says that’s her will and ends with a “goodbye”.

The letter says she is choosing to die and doesn’t want her body to be handed over to Turkish government officials. “Do not give my corpse to the oppressors,” it says.

She had asked to be buried in Ireland in a “handful of soil” in a “cemevi” where people of her Alevi faith are buried. But in late January, she was buried in Turkey, repatriated with the help of the Turkish embassy in Dublin.

A spokesperson for the Turkish embassy said it had offered “necessary” consular aid to Ateşoğlu’s family.

Ateşoğlu’s note implies a thorny relationship with family – “I don’t have a family”– and her friends in Ireland and Turkey say she’d shared painful experiences about her struggles to be accepted by them as a queer woman and a Kurdish woman, refusing to deny her roots.

In a text message, a family member said they didn’t want to talk.

A spokesperson for the Turkish embassy said, “due to the law on protection of personal data”, it can’t comment on her case in detail. They didn’t elaborate on whether that means GDPR – which doesn’t cover the data of dead people – or a specific Turkish law.

Spokespeople for the Department of Foreign Affairs and An Garda Síochána referred queries about Ateşoğlu, including her farewell note and request and generally about the process in the aftermath of asylum seekers’ deaths, to each other and the Department of Justice.

A spokesperson for the Department of Justice has not yet responded to queries sent on 12 February.

A spokesperson from the Department of Children and Equality – which was in charge of accommodating asylum seekers – said it doesn’t comment on peoples’ personal circumstances, but it “would like to express sincere condolences to the family and friends of the resident who died last year”.

“Any questions about repatriation should be directed to An Garda Síochána,” the spokesperson said.

Last wish

Right after she heard about Ateşoğlu, Williams, the woman in the centre, tripped climbing down the stairs and twisted her ankle, she says.

“It’s like, you’ve lost a daughter, you’ve lost a friend. For me, I was devastated,” Williams said.

Residents struggled to get information about what had happened from officials, says Williams. “I was like, ‘We’re adults, we just need to know for closure.’”

When the cops showed up at the centre, they mentioned her note, saying they couldn’t read it, Williams said.

“There was no Turkish translator in the world that could help them,” she said sarcastically, shaking her head.

Lucky Khambule of the Movement of Asylum Seekers in Ireland (MASI) says MASI is disappointed about that.

“Our view is that the note should have been read,” he said.

And if it wasn’t translated, it should’ve been, as part of Gardaí’s investigation, he said. “Not understanding it is not an excuse at all,” Khambule said.

No matter what happened, “her wishes should have been observed with respect and dignity she deserved”, he said.

Ken McCue, cultural planner at Sports Against Racism Ireland (SARI) – a group that Ateşoğlu, who was a professional soccer player, trained and coached with – said in a text message that he had been trying to arrange a funeral for her here last year and had asked Khambule for help, but officials kept them in the dark.

Sorrow racks up

Williams, the woman at the centre, said that in recent months Ateşoğlu had been moved to another floor, so she didn’t see her as often as she used to in the months and weeks closer to her death.

But she’d noticed a change, Williams said, a sadness across her face and a growing rage that sometimes snuck up. “She was still laughing, but it wasn’t the same.”

Just a week before her death, Williams had chimed in to calm down Ateşoğlu, who was arguing with a kitchen porter, she said. She unravelled and told her to stay out of it. “She had never spoken like that to me before,” said Williams.

Williams said she’d chalked up some of her recent turmoil to an autoimmune disease called ankylosing spondylitis that sometimes flared up and made her double over in pain.

She’d struggled to access specialist care, said Amina Abdirizak, former resident of the centre and Ateşoğlu’s close friend.

Abdirizak and Ateşoğlu bonded over a shared passion for social justice and a desire to empower women to thrive, said Abdirizak recently. “She loved empowering women.”

A video from a SARI soccer match shows Abdirizak and Ateşoğlu walking hand-in-hand with sunny smiles, both dressed in red jerseys.

The footage shows them giving an interview at one point. Ateşoğlu says they’d been using soccer as a relief.

“We are refugee women, we had a lot of [stress], we had a lot of [anxiety]. I’m a football coach, and Amina said, ‘Okay, we have a football coach, why we are not playing football?’” says Ateşoğlu, a smile growing on her face.

In the asylum centre, she formed a soccer team and made a WhatsApp group to organise games for the women, said Abdirizak.

She says she watched Ateşoğlu nurse shards of wounding experiences and encounters, though she tried so hard not to cave into grief.

“She never gave up. She jumped hurdle to hurdle. Her whole life was a test.”

Says Ateşoğlu’s letter: “No one knows how many times I got close to death, how many times I stood up with courage.”

That one time, a doctor told her she should be grateful that she was even on a waiting list to see a specialist – as someone who wasn’t born here, says Abdirizak.

How she bared her soul and shared private parts of herself with asylum officials so they’d believe she was a queer woman, Abdirizak said –  which traumatised her.

“You have to show them something intimate and private even to be believed that you’re part of the [LGBTQ] community.”

A spokesperson for the Department of Children and Equality said it is liaising with the HSE on ways to better meet the mental health needs of people seeking asylum.

“This includes working closely with the HSE Social Inclusion Outreach Team to provide healthcare assistance for residents,” they said.

Its International Protection Accommodation Services (IPAS) has a dedicated resident welfare team, too, “who direct highly vulnerable residents people and those with specific health needs to relevant health services”, they said.

Shortly before dying on her birthday, Ateşoğlu had asked Abdirizak about celebration plans for that day, but her question drowned in their cheers and chatter with another friend, she says. “I still regret I didn’t answer her question.”

Over pieces of earth

Ateşoğlu had written to IPAS asking to be moved to Dublin, where she often travelled to volunteer and coach soccer, which wasn’t easy with painful flare-ups, said Abdirizak.

She was also studying to sit an IELTS English language exam to be able to enrol in a master’s course at University College Dublin (UCD), she says. “She was so brilliant, they waived the fees for her.”

“I never forget it. She wrote to IPAS ‘Please, you are the only lifeline I have, help me relocate to Dublin’. And they said, ‘No, your medical reason is not enough,’” said Abdirizak.

Williams, the other woman at the Galway asylum centre, says, like Ateşoğlu, she and other women feel like they need to work themselves to fatigue.

People tell each other, work, volunteer, study, and overdo them all to improve your chances of getting status and finding acceptance, she said.

“You have to volunteer, you have to do this and that, just so they consider you as a human being,” says Abdirizak.

Everybody says something, said Williams, lots of dos and don’ts that weigh heavy.

“I acknowledge my weakness, my wounds, and my exhaustion. I choose to die,” says Ateşoğlu’s letter.

It says all she wanted was peace, justice, and freedom, but she didn’t find them here either.

“I just wanted to live in more justice, more freedom, and more peace. Away from fights, from evil, from discriminations, from battles,” she wrote.

Williams, Abdirizak and her friends in Turkey say they want the public to know who she was and how she was let down by those who had the power to help her or at least grant her final wish.

Nilay Ateşoğlu loved dancing and poetry. She taught Turkish dance to some of the women at her asylum shelter.

She wrote her thesis in Istanbul about soccer as a vehicle to elevate women. It’s titled “Women’s Football in Turkey from the Perspective of Gender Equality”.

She enjoyed teaching kids how to play soccer in Ireland and in Turkey. She used to say “football is for everyone”.

She was a board member of BoMovu, a sports collective serving vulnerable women in Istanbul, where she told them not to allow injustice to sum up their whole lives, said Nil Delahaye of BoMovu recently.

“I don’t have a home, I don’t have a country. Some borders were drawn over pieces of earth,” wrote Ateşoğlu in her farewell letter.