Dr. Orouba Barakat was a distinguished Syrian human rights defender and documentary producer who had opposed the regimes of Hafez and Bashar al-Assad since the 1980s, known for producing exposés on torture in prisons and regime massacres. After being forced into exile due to her activism, she lived in the UK and the UAE before settling in Istanbul in 2012, where she planned to establish an association called “Women Without Borders” to support Syrian women survivors of violence and oppression. Her 22-year-old daughter, Halla Barakat, was a journalist and editor for the opposition channel Orient News and was about to join the Montada Al-Sharq news platform when she was murdered alongside her mother. On 21 September 2017, their bodies were discovered in their apartment in Üsküdar, Istanbul. Both had been fatally stabbed. Reports indicate that ten days earlier, they had received a chilling death threat via phone and social media warning that if they did not ‘keep their mouth shut’, they would be killed. Turkish authorities arrested a distant relative, Ahmed Barakat, on 30 September 2017, after identifying him via security footage. He confessed to the killings, stating that he killed Dr. Barakat after she refused to pay him money and then murdered Halla to eliminate a witness. On 13 March 2018, an Istanbul court sentenced him to life imprisonment and an aggravated life sentence for intentional killing and evidence tampering; his appeal was subsequently denied, and the verdict upheld. Despite this, human rights organisations have raised serious concerns about the investigation, noting that political motives may remain unexplored, that evidence may have been inadequately examined, and that the alteration of Dr. Barakat’s Twitter account posting Assad imagery soon after the killings suggests possible tampering. Their murders sent shockwaves through the Syrian exile community in Turkey, contributing to a climate of fear among activists.