Iraqi militias tortured and killed hundreds of gay men
Hundreds of gay men have been tortured and killed in a growing, systematic campaign against suspected homosexual activity that may be aided by Iraqi security forces, a prominent human rights group said in a report.
The bodies of several gay men were found in Baghdad’s main Shia district of Sadr City earlier this year with the Arabic words for “pervert” and “puppy” – considered derogatory terms for homosexuals in Iraq – written on their chests, according to a report released Monday by Human Rights Watch.
According to Human Rights Watch, which is urging a government crackdown, attackers target people on the streets or storm homes, where they conduct interrogations and demand names of suspected gay men. Many end up in hospitals and morgues, the organization said, basing its conclusion on reports from doctors.
Men have been threatened with “honor killings” by relatives worried that their “unmanly behavior” will ruin the family’s reputation, Human Rights Watch said.
Killings, kidnappings and torture of those suspected of homosexual conduct have intensified in areas such as the Baghdad neighborhood of Sadr City, the watchdog said.
“In 2004, militias and unknown groups started to go after the gays … but the peak was six months ago,” said Qaisar, who uses a pseudonym for fear of reprisal. “It has become wide scale war against gays in Iraq.”
“The Shiite people started this war and especially what happened in Sadr City,” Qaisar said, adding that his sister-in-law had warned him against going to the area.
Human Rights Watch included the individual accounts of dozens of Iraqi men forced to flee their homes or the country because of a “radically new intensity” to anti-gay attacks in Iraq this year.
Among them is Atif, 27, from the Zayouna area of Baghdad, who said he fled for northern Iraq at the beginning of April.
“I call people in Baghdad and they tell me, ‘Don’t come back, they are massacring us. They are massacring gays here,'” the report quoted him as saying.
Another man described how four masked men, dressed in black, kidnapped his partner of 10 years in April.
“He was found in the neighbourhood the day after,” the man was quoted as saying. “They had thrown his corpse in the garbage. His genitals were cut off and a piece of his throat was ripped out.”
“Iraq’s leaders are supposed to defend all Iraqis, not abandon them to armed agents of hate,” said Scott Long, director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights Program at Human Rights Watch. “Turning a blind eye to torture and murder threatens the rights and life of every Iraqi.”
An Iraqi Interior Ministry official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to discuss the issue with the media, acknowledged there has been a sharp escalation in attacks against gay men this year by suspected Shiite extremists. But he told The Associated Press that the ministry does not have numbers “because in most cases the family members themselves are either involved in the killing or prefer to keep silent, fearing shame.”
The former No. 2 official at the U.S. Embassy in Iraq, Patricia Butenis, wrote in a letter to a U.S. congressman that reports from contacts familiar with the areas where some of the bodies were found “suggest the killings are the work of militias who believe homosexuality is a form of Western deviance that cannot be tolerated.”
The letter was in response to concerns raised by U.S. Rep. Jared Polis, a Colorado Democrat who is openly gay. Polis had brought up the issue during a visit to Iraq.
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