She is a co-founder and the director of the Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq, and serves as the editor of the newspaper Al-Mousawat (Equality).

She started the first shelters for women in Iraq since 2003, protecting them from "honor killing" and sex-trafficking, a network that expanded to 11 houses in 5 cities in 2018.

She was raised and lived in the city within a liberal family where her mother was a school teacher and her father was an engineer.

Her grandfather on her mother's side was religious, and a prominent man in his community who "definitely deserved the honorary title of Mullah", except that he married his ex-wife's fourteen-year-old younger sister, which first spurred Yanar Mohammed to take up the cause of women's rights.

[13] Yanar highlights the contrast between the treatment of her grandmothers half a century ago and the regressing daily experience of women in Iraq nowadays.

[1] As a result of her work on women's rights that questions the extreme interpretations of Islam, Yanar Mohammed has been subjected to death threats and was forced to restrict her movement.

Jaish al Sahaba, part of the Iraqi Islamist group the Supreme Command for Jihad and Liberation, sent two death threats to Yanar Mohammed in 2004.