"They Want Us Exterminated": savage purging of gays in Baghdad
This story needs more international publicity.
"The Hunted"
New York Magazine, October 3, 2009\by Matt McAllester
From Baghdad--frightening reports of gay pogroms, where homosexual men are targeted, tortured, slayed. From New York--a scurry to find those same men before they are killed, and shepherd them to safety.
On a bright afternoon in late March, an 18-year-old named Fadi stood in a friend's clothing store in Baghdad checking out the new merchandise. A worker in a neighboring store walked into the boutique with a newspaper in his hand and shared a story he had just read. It was about "sexual deviants," he said. Gay men's rectums had been glued shut, and they had been force-fed laxatives and water until their insides exploded. They had been found dead on the street....
At minimum what publicity might help is to make people who think the following extreme way pariahs within the Mideast and pariahs within majority Islam--from the story:
"Killing gays is halal," one of the men said, meaning it was permissible under Islamic law. "We'll get points in heaven for it."
And hopefully, shame on the international front about the general attitude of Iraqi society towards gays, which is the main thing that is allowing such extremists to act out their beliefs, might have some gradual effects in changing minds there the way it has elsewhere.
If you read that story, you will find that Human Rights Watch is involved, and contrary to their usual procedure, the situation is so bad that they are intervening to try to save individuals. For more:
Murder, Torture, Sexual Orientation and Gender in Iraq
August 17, 2009, Human Rights Watch
This 67-page report documents a wide-reaching campaign of extrajudicial executions, kidnappings, and torture of gay men that began in early 2009. The killings began in the vast Baghdad neighborhood of Sadr City, a stronghold of Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia, and spread to many cities across Iraq. Mahdi Army spokesmen have promoted fears about the "third sex" and the "feminization" of Iraq men, and suggested that militia action was the remedy. Some people told Human Rights Watch that Iraqi security forces have colluded and joined in the killing.
