Gays killed in Iraq...
Here's the latest information on what is happening in Iraq...
A new wave of assassinations of Iraqi gays - part of the organized campaign of "sexual cleansing" of homosexuals that has been one of the saddest byproducts of the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq - has been confirmed by Iraqi LGBT, the all-volunteer, London-based group of gay Iraqi exiles that has been documenting the grim work of the Islamist anti-gay death squads in Iraq.
Ali Hili is the 33-year-old gay Iraqi exile who founded Iraqi LGBT three years ago in London with 30 other gay Iraqis, and is now the group's coordinator. Iraqi LGBT has members, supporters, and informants throughout Iraq, with whose help the group has been able to document and confirm a bloody harvest of assassinations by fanatically anti-gay Islamist enforcers.
Hili told Gay City News this week of the following new confirmed murders and arrests of gay Iraqis, all of which occurred at the beginning of this month. (Pseudonyms have been used for those still living to protect their safety.)
Mustafa, 26, was a well-known gay man in his neighborhood in the city of Najaf, south of Baghdad, who went out for a walk with a friend to shop for clothes. Mustafa was stopped and arrested by the local militia of the Badr Corps - the armed branch of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), which is the largest Shia political formation in Iraq.
The Badr Corps was integrated into the Ministry of the Interior's police last year, and its anti-gay death squads since then have operated with full police powers.
Mustafa was separated from his friend, taken to an isolated area, and shot and killed on the spot by the Badr militia, reported Haydar, an Iraqi LGBT member in Najaf.
Ali, a gay lad of 17, was also killed in Najaf in early July.
"One of our main sources in Najaf told us that his young friend Ali had been killed for his gay behavior and his sexuality, " Hili told Gay City News, adding, "Ali's mother told our source during a phone conversation that her son had disappeared, only to be later found shot to death in a nearby neighborhood."
In the small Southern Iraqi town of al-Simawa - a stronghold of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi army, which has also deployed anti-gay death squads - two gay friends, aged 29 and 30, received death threats targeting their homosexuality. Within a few days, the two young men were assassinated.
posted by GayandRight @ 6:21 PM
2 Comments:
Deplorable behaviour to be sure, but it's hard to miss the ideological tilt of the article.
'byproducts of the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq.'
Saying the hate-killings are 'byproducts' of the American invasion implies causation, which is a stretch even Reed Richards would find hard to make.
The reality is that alternative sexual lifestyles are not well tolerated in even the more western influenced middle eastern countries. You'd be hard pressed to argue that the Iraq gay community was thriving risk-free under Saddam and his band of thugs. They were persecuted before the war and continue to be, but to contort yourself to the point of linking the deaths to landing of American and British soldiers is the work of those wearing blinders and with an axe to grind.
Mark,
"Homosexuality was legal in Iraq under Saddam Hussein until late 2001, when under pressure from religious conservatives he criminalized the act of sodomy. A law passed in 2001 made sodomy punishable by imprisonment, and repeated convictions punishable by death. It should be noted however that despite the change in law there where no known cases in which the death penalty was applied for the offence by Iraqi Courts. Hussein had previously refused to criminalise homosexuality, as it went against the Secular Socialist beliefs of the Ba'ath Party"
Huge difference between what's now happening to those from an "alternative sexual lifestyle" in Iraq.
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