Leaders of Iraqi LGBT report that fundamentalist Shia militias in Iraq are tracking down and killing gay people.
Apparently life for Iraqi gays was better under a brutal secular dictator than it is today with armed rightwing religious fanatics roaming the streets.
The group’s founder, Ali Hili, says two Iraqi LGBT members were killed inside a safe house they operated in Najaf earlier this year. A young boy the two women had rescued from the sex industry was also murdered.
Iraqi LGBT has been operating five safe houses for gay people but says it has closed three of them due to lack of funding. Now the lives of the people forced out of the shelters are in danger,say Ali Hili:
Over 30 gay residents who we cared for in these three safe houses now have to take their chances in a country where religious militia regularly seek out gays and execute them. We feel deserted by the international gay community. Few people seem to care about our fate,
One member of the group said,”Nowadays, we don’t dare be seen in the neighbourhoods where we used to live. It is too dangerous for anyone known to be gay or to have had a homosexual past.”
Interestingly, Ali Hili blames the U.S. and British invasion and occupation for setting loose the homophobic killing spree:
Their armies invaded and occupied our land, destroyed the infrastructure of government, and created the chaos and lawlessness that has allowed religious fundamentalism to flourish and to terrorise woman and gay people.
Violence against gays has intensified sharply since late 2005, when Iraq’s leading Shiite Muslim cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, issued a fatwa, or religious decree, which declared that gays and lesbians should be ‘killed in the worst, most severe way possible’.
Since then, LGBT people have been specifically targeted by the Madhi Army, the militia of fundamentalist Shia cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, as well as by the Badr organisation and other Shia death squads. Badr is the military arm of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which is one of the leading political forces in Baghdad’s
Apparently life for Iraqi gays was better under a brutal secular dictator than it is today with armed rightwing religious fanatics roaming the streets.
For information on making a donation to keep the safe houses open, visit the Iraqi LGBT website.
