News Slant	News Slant Archive

Iraqi police raided a safe house in Baghdad's al-Shaab quarter on November 9th, 2006, abducting five gay activists. The men, ranging in age from 19 to 29, had ties to the underground group Iraqi LGBT. A few days later, Haydar Kamel, a gay-identified men's clothier in Sadr City-- Baghdad's teeming proletarian suburb-- was kidnapped by members of the Shiite Mahdi Army. Elsewhere in the Iraqi capital, police took four men into custody at the Jar al-Qamar barbershop, an establishment known to have gay patrons.

A

View our poll archive

s The Guide goes to press, the fate of all ten men remains unknown. Many familiar with the widening pattern of abduction and execution across Iraq assume that all have been killed.

Iraqi LGBT was founded in London by Ali Hili and 30 other Iraqi exiles in November 2005. The organization must operate cautiously even in London, where the entity most responsible for the murder of gay Iraqis, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), maintains an office. Hili says he has been "threatened many times here in the UK" by Iraqis loyal to the current US-backed regime.

Under a veil of secrecy, Hili has cultivated and maintained contact with LGBT people across Iraq. Many of his original in-country contacts have, however, perished or vanished within the past year.

Iraqi LGBT has also been called the Abu Nuwas Group. Abu Nuwas (circa 750-�810 CE), a Baghdad court poet during the caliphate of Haroun al-Rashid, wrote openly about the delights of wine and boys. Translator Edward A. Lacey places the poet's work among "the glories of Arabic literature." Abu Nuwas lived at a time when, although homosexual acts were deemed haram (forbidden), cultural conventions permitted their widespread practice within parameters of discretion. Such conventions long prevailed throughout the Arab world.

In modern Iraq, homosexual activity has been especially common in conservative Shiite strongholds where the sexes are rigorously separated, such as the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, and some parts of Baghdad. These are also the areas where reprisals against gay people now occur most frequently. Elsewhere there is considerable overlap between attacks on known or suspected queers and attacks on Sunni Muslims.

Briefly open, now shut

In the 1980s and early '90s, Baghdad had at least two gay clubs. The Hotel Palestine, a haven for Western journalists, maintained a bar that attracted gay Iraqi artists and entertainers. As long as its presence did not become overtly public, Iraq's gay community was generally ignored until the waning days of Saddam Hussein's reign.

The social fabric of Iraq was badly abraded by international sanctions imposed on the country after the 1991 Gulf War. The sanctions encouraged conservative anger at all things Western. In the 1990s, government persecution of sexual minorities increased. The few gay businesses were shut down. Many gay Iraqis with the means to emigrate did so. Iraqi LGBT founder Ali Hili fled the country in January 2000.

In 2001, in an apparent sop to religious conservatives, Saddam imposed the death penalty for sexual offenses including rape, prostitution, and homosexual acts. An Iraqi gay community persisted sub rosa, however, through the March, 2003 US/UK invasion and subsequent occupation-- which caused Iraqi society to implode.

The Iraqi civil war-- a many-faceted catastrophe now tipping into chaos-- began with strife between adherents of the dominant Islamic strains, Sunni and Shiite. The Iraqi Sunni minority, ascendant under Saddam, is historically better attuned to modern secular culture. Sunnis helped set the tone for Saddam's secular state-- a state where, despite dictatorial brutalities, a broad range of creativity and scholarship flourished, women enjoyed considerable freedom, and a discreet gay community was mostly left alone. For devout Shiites, such a culture reeked of Western decadence.

Revolutionary ardor

Many Iraqi Shiites have long regarded Iran as a model for a future theocratic state. Like Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, Iraq's eastern neighbor and former enemy has a rigorous Islamic legal system that dispenses death sentences for a host of crimes, including homosexuality.

The overarching figure in an Iraqi Shiite theocracy would be Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the Iranian-born spiritual leader of SCIRI, the country's largest political party. Because of his support for democratic elections, al-Sistani is deemed a moderate by the US-led occupying forces.

Iraq's US-nurtured, transitional "unity" government is now headed by a Shiite, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, deputy leader of the militant Islamic Dawa Party, presently working in collaboration with SCIRI. In August 2006, al-Maliki banned media reportage of Iraqis daily onslaught of killings-- atrocities in which some of the Prime Minister's constituents are implicated.

Anti-gay incidents erupted soon after US forces swept into Baghdad in 2003, but intensified in October 2005, when Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani issued a legal pronouncement-- a fatwa-- against homosexuals, saying gay men and lesbians deserve to be "punished, in fact, killed... in the worst, most severe way of killing." The fatwa has since been removed from al-Sistani's website, which emanates from Qom, Iran, but the decree has not been retracted.

The Iraqi constitution, approved by referendum amid considerable fanfare (and US pressure) in December 2005, designates Islam as the official state religion and a "basic source of legislation." The extent to which Sharia, Islamic law, really governs Iraq remains unclear, but Section 111 of the current Iraqi penal code effectively gives permission to kill anyone who commits "crimes against Islam." Such crimes include a laundry list of sexual transgressions. The fatwa may be, in fact, redundant.

Death squads target gays

Amid turmoil, religious factions have seized portions of the Iraqi court system, enforcing Sharia as if it were indeed the law of the land. These autonomous courts reinforce protection for those who commit "honor killings" of gay people, and mete out death sentences to their potential victims. Religious courts may sentence gay men to death in absentia; militiamen then hunt them down for execution.

Gay-related attacks are now largely the work of two Shiite militias: the Badr Corps, a paramilitary arm of SCIRI, and the Mahdi Army, the armed forces of Moktada al-Sadr, a cleric with iconic status among Iraq's poor.

The Badr Corps has been tracking and killing homosexuals, sometimes entrapping them via gay internet chat rooms, sometimes relying on neighborhood gossip. Effeminate men and bachelors over 30 are watched, and in many cases threatened with death if they do not marry within a month.

Members of death squads sometimes wear police uniforms and are, in fact, police. Infiltrating the ranks of Iraqi security forces, the Badr Corps has harnessed official law enforcement to its own agenda, sometimes maintaining its own extralegal detention centers. Gay Iraqis view advice to seek police protection as a mordant joke. Many have gone into hiding.

Grim litany

Stories abound-- some unsubstantiated, some well-documented-- of torture, beatings, and assassinations of queers throughout Iraq. Murders of LGBT people were becoming commonplace in Iraq before the fatwa ever appeared on Ayatollah al-Sistani's website. In September 2005, a 40-year-old transsexual named Haydar Faeik was beaten and burned to death on a well-traveled Baghdad street by Badr militiamen.

Last March, three men thought to be gay were shot to death in the Iraqi city of Ramadi. Boys, reportedly as young as 11, have been gunned down for turning to prostitution; in May 2006, a 14-year-old boy who sold himself to men was killed by police. In June 2006, an Islamist death squad killed a lesbian couple, along with a child they were sheltering, in Najaf. Witnesses say they recently saw Baghdad police kill a man who purportedly had an affair with a male American soldier.

In the August 6th, 2006, Observer/UK, journalist Jennifer Copestake cited a number of cases, including that of Dr. Haider Jaber, then seeking asylum in the UK. Jaber left Iraq after having been punched, kicked, and aggressively threatened. His partner, who remained in Baghdad, was shot. The man's family was forbidden to claim his body for burial. "They said he didn't deserve it because he was an animal," Jaber told the press.

Gay men, lesbians, crossdressers, and transsexuals are not the only targets. Others include female prostitutes, feminists, women who go out unaccompanied and/ or without head scarves, secular intellectuals, consumers of alcohol, and wearers of shorts or jeans. Films, theater, literature, music, and art are under attack. Having congratulated itself upon the perhaps temporary destruction of the repressive Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the US, through its support for right-wing theocrats, is presiding over the Talibanization of Iraq.

The Iraqi LGBT website Iraqilgbtuk.blogspot.com describes the current regime as "even more suppressive and violent" than that of Saddam. The statement is credible to anyone who has watched the disarticulation of Iraqi society since 2003, when, with help from British Prime Minister Tony Blair, US President George W. Bush opened Pandora's box.

"Blair and Bush collude with the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI)," says Peter Tatchell of the British gay rights organization OutRage!, which has been assisting Iraqi LGBT. "The immoral and illegal invasion of Iraq by the US and UK has created the chaos and lawlessness that has allowed the Islamic fundamentalists to gain power and influence, and to unleash their killer militias."

Ali Hili and his colleagues complain of a "resounding silence" from most human rights organizations, and from the governments of the UK and the US.

Gay Iraqis, most of whom choose anonymity, say that US soldiers have answered their pleas for help with ridicule or dismissal, denying them protection and shutting them out of the Green Zone, the gated bastion of government officials and command centers of the occupation. This response is steeped in the institutionalized homophobia of America's don't-ask-don't-tell military. At the high-security prison where Saddam Hussein awaits execution, US Marine guards have been amusing themselves by forcing Saddam to watch the animated film South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, in which he is portrayed as a raging queen whose lover is Satan. Regarding fags, the Marines would seem to have points in common with Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani.

On December 4th in Washington, DC, George W. Bush welcomed with Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of SCIRI and former head of the Badr Corps, into the Oval Office.

"We talked," said President Bush after the meeting, "about the need to give the government of Iraq more capability... to secure their country from extremists and murderers."

"As an Iraqi gay man," says Ali Hili, "I find it offensive for the American president to invite Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim to the White House. This man helped establish the deadliest organization in the modern history of Iraq-- SCIRI and its Badr Corps death squads. Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim and his party are responsible for the killing of thousands of innocent Sunnis and other minorities, including gay, lesbian, and transgender. We need the help and support of the world to stop the killing of innocent Iraqi civilians within these communities."