IRAQI LGBT

Iraqi LGBT launch new website

2010-06-10T21:04:00.002+01:00

Press Statement
For immediate use

Iraqi LGBT launch new website

London, June 10 - The human rights group Iraqi LGBT is launching a new website iraqilgbt.org.uk this Saturday June 12 from 9pm at Habibi Club in London.

Habibi Club is known as the 'best Middle Eastern LGBT club night' in London.

There will be snacks and lots of freebies.

The resident DJ Nikki Lucas will be playing the finest Rai’n’B, Arabic, Turkish, Greek, Urban Desi and Balkan flavas, with special guests Sheerien (Uber Lingua Austraila) & Georgia (Hade,Notes,Yalla, Wotever World)

Snakeboy Sunny will be 'live and direct' on the dancefloor

Admission is £4 before 10pm, £6 till midnight, £7 After and there is free entry to Drag Artists

Start Time:	Saturday, June 12, 2010 at 9:00pm
End Time:	Sunday, June 13, 2010 at 3:00am
Location:	The Oak Bar
Street:	79 Green Lanes, Stoke Newington
	View Map

The website has been developed Pro Bono by Second Variety, "a web company with a difference", with particular thanks to Jamie Archer and Erez Odier, as well as Paul Canning and Matthew Heckart who have helped develop the website.

The website development has been made possible by funding received by the Netherlands-based group Hivos, the Humanist Institute for Development Cooperation. Their support for Iraqi LGBT is now in its second year.

Hivos also help to support Iraqi LGBT's 'safe house' project, which shelters many lesbians, gay men and transgender people in Iraq from attack and potential murder.

ENDS

Information for editors

Iraqi LGBT is a human rights organisation with members inside Iraq and in exile. It provides safe houses for gays, lesbians and transgender people and has helped people escape into exile.

Iraqi LGBT has documented over 700 murders in Iraq.

Iraqi LGBT extremely concerned by new plans for UK removals of refugees to Iraq

2010-06-04T17:49:00.000+01:00

Asylum seekers from Iraq facing deportation from Britain. Left to right: Ali Namiq, Rahman Rasoul, anonymous refugee, Sirajadin Hosmadin Bahadin. Photograph: Sean Smith for the Guardian

Press statement

London, 4 June 2010 - The Iraqi LGBT group has today expressed its 'deep concern' about reports that the British Home Office is planning to return 100 Iraqi refugees to Baghdad Wednesday 9 June - despite a recent UK report saying this was not safe.

"This group will certainly contain deeply closeted gay people and they will be at extreme risk of torture and murder in Baghdad," said Group leader Ali Hili.

Iraqi LGBT say that the Iraqi government provide no security for gays - infact the opposite as its members have reported the involvement of both police and Interior Ministry forces in handing over gay people to militias with either their tortured bodies being subsequently discovered or them disappearing.

The group has just released new testimony about Iraqi government complicity on YouTube, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ts3PedvPrs

Said Hili, "the Western media is not reporting the level of violence continuing in Baghdad. Bombings and assassinations continue to happen almost daily - this is why the United Nations said it is unsafe to remove refugees to that city. The lack of reporting means that the Home Office think they can get away with this inhuman action."

Amnesty International said in April that there was evidence that members of the security forces and other authorities were encouraging the targeting of people suspected to be gay.

The report added that killers of gay men could find protection under the law, as it offers lenient sentences for those committing crimes with an “honourable motive”.

"We condemn the proposed removals by the British government and the Iraqi government's complicity. Many of these people are opponents of the regime and if returned will end up being killed."

It has been reported by the International Federation of Iraqi Refugees (IFIR) that the 100 refugees have been screened by UK Border Agency 'ambassadors' pretending to be Iraqi embassy representatives at a detention centre. Refugees have reported being threatened by those 'interviewing' them.

"We are very familiar with such threats," said Ali. "I and other members of our group in exile have faced this, as have our family members. Many of our members have been murdered in Iraq and we have had safe houses invaded and people massacred. If these people are removed many of them will also be murdered."

Iraqi LGBT has cataloged 738 murders in the past five years.

The group has backed the call by the IFIR for the British government to end what IFIR calls "this inhuman policy" of refugee removals to Iraq.

Notes for editors

1. Iraqi LGBT is a human rights organisation with members inside Iraq and in exile. It provides safe houses for gays, lesbians and transgender people and has helped people escape into exile.

2. The International Federation of Iraqi Refugees campaigns for the rights of Iraqi refugees and against forcible deportations and detention. The Coalition to Stop Deportations to Iraq campaigns against the forcible deportation and detention of Iraqi refugees.

3. The flight will be the first to Iraq since the 14th October, when ten people were deported to Baghdad and the thirty-three others on the plane were sent back by the Iraqi authorities.
See www.csdiraq.com for more information

4. At least four million Iraqis have been forced to flee either to another part of Iraq or abroad since the war began in 2003

5. According to Home Office figures, 632 people were forcibly deported to the KRG region in the north between 2005 and 2008. The International Federation of Iraqi Refugees estimates that the figure, with the monthly charter flights deporting 50 people at a time since the beginning of 2009, currently stands at approximately 900.

6. Iraqi LGBT has worked with and supported the work of IFIR for several years.

International Federation of Iraqi Refugees Iraqi refugees given tickets for deportation flight to Baghdad for Wednesday 9th June
pinknews.co.uk: UK 'breaching UN rules' on returning gay asylum seekers
Guardian: Failed Iraq asylum seekers screened for forced deportation

Video: Iraqi government complicity in anti-gay pogrom

2010-05-28T09:47:00.001+01:00

Iraqi LGBT presents evidence of government forces actions against gays and transgender people in Iraq.

Testimony smuggled out of Iraq shows how police and Interior Ministry forces are terrorising LGBT people.

Event: Celebrate launch of new Iraqi LGBT website

2010-05-27T17:53:00.000+01:00

Image via Wikipedia

HABIBI CLUB LONDON

BEST MIDDLE EASTERN LGBT CLUB NIGHT IN LONDON

COME and CELEBRATE the Launch of LGBT IRAQI SOLIDARITY GROUP web site
10% of door takings going to the LGBT Iraqi Solidarity Group.
There will be snacks and lots of freebies.

RESIDENT DJ NIKKI LUCAS will be playing the finest Rai’n’B, Arabic, Turkish, Greek, Urban Desi and Balkan flavas, with special guests SHEERIEN (Uber Lingua Austraila) & GEORGIA (Hade,Notes,Yalla, Wotever World)

SNAKEBOY SUNNY will be live and direct on the dancefloor

SPREAD THE WORD AND SEE YOU THERE!!!

ADMISSION
£4 before 10pm, £6 till midnight, £7 After
Free entry to Drag Artists

Start Time:	Saturday, June 12, 2010 at 9:00pm
End Time:	Sunday, June 13, 2010 at 3:00am
Location:	The Oak Bar
Street:	79 Green Lanes, Stoke Newington
City/Town:	London, United Kingdom
	View Map

From Baghdad to Blantyre: Gays in Iraq express solidarity with gays in Malawi

2010-05-22T15:50:00.001+01:00

Press statement

In a message from Baghdad, lesbians and gays living in hiding from death squads in that city have expressed their solidarity with the Malawian gay couple Tiwonge Chimbalanga and Steven Monjeza sentenced to 14 years imprisonment in Blantyre this week.

Their message reads:

"The Lgbt community inside Iraq would like to shows its solidarity and support for Tiwonge and Steven in Malawi."

بغداد ٢٠-٥-٢٠١٠

تستنكر منظمة مثيليي العراق بكافة اعضايها داخل وخارج العراق قرار الحبس الجائر بخصوص

"As the Lgbt community inside Iraq is suffering the most in the modern history of Iraq, we feel that our pain is similar, our enemy is one."

"Homophobia is the enemy all the Lgbt are facing. We call for action and solidarity and we call upon the Malawi government to immediately release the couple and issue an apology to the Lgbt community in Malawai."

Lesbians and gays in Iraq are supported by two safe houses run by Iraqi LGBT, a human rights organisation based in London.

The five year old organisation has previously run more safe houses but is unable to offer more support through safe houses or in most parts of the country due to lack of funding. Nevertheless, Iraqi LGBT has members throughout Iraq who try to support each other.

Iraqi LGBT also supports some refugees who it has helped flee to escape direct threats on their life. Threats have followed some of them outside Iraq. Leader Ali Hili moved house in London due to them and continues to receive regular threats.

The group has documented the violent deaths of over 700 lesbians, gays and transgender people in Iraq at the hands of militias and some government forces over the past five years.

No one has been prosecuted for these crimes and no action has been taken by the Iraqi government to offer any sort of protection for lesbians, gays and transgender people.

Steven Monjeza and Tiwonge Chimbalanga were handed a 14 year jail sentence for homosexuality on Thursday in Blantyre, Malawi.

The sentence has been condemned by many governments. Human rights activist Peter Tatchell said: “Fourteen years with hard labour could kill Steven and Tiwonge. Malawi's prison conditions are appallingly unhealthy.”

“Detainees die in custody. Infectious diseases like TB are rife. Medical treatment is sub-standard. Food rations are very poor nutritional value; mostly maize porridge, beans and water, causing malnutrition. After only five months behind bars, Steven has been seriously ill and has not received proper medical treatment.”

Iraqi LGBT takes part in International Day against Homophobia

2010-05-10T21:08:00.000+01:00

Camden LGBT Forum
Saturday 15 May, 2.30PM
The 52 Club, Gower Street

Talks by Ali Hili, Reverend Roland Jide Macaulay, Exhibition of Paul Harfleet's amazing Pansy Project, Songs by Pilar Awa, Exclusive Video Footage of Iraq
Free Refreshments-no need to book-just turn up.

Just Friends
IDAHO special: gays in Iraq
Wednesday 19 May, 7:00PM.

This event is open to members of “Just Friends” only, but if you are interested in attending, please email deco24@tiscali.co.uk

Iraqi LGBT receives Monette-Horwitz award

2010-05-07T21:14:00.001+01:00

Iraqi LGBT is honoured to have received a 2010 Monette-Horwitz Trust Award.

The awards were established in the will of the late novelist Paul Monette to recognize his relationship with the late Roger Horwitz and to honor individuals and organizations for their significant contributions toward eradicating homophobia. They come with a $2500 cheque.

They are awarded to individuals of diverse cultural backgrounds, genders, and sexual orientations. The Trust acknowledges the accomplishments of organizations and persons working in arenas ranging from academic research and creative expression to activism and community organizing.

The Trust told Iraqi LGBT "what you are doing to monitor abuse of LGBT in Iraq is very important, and we want to support and encourage your continuing work."

"We greatly admire what you are doing and we hope the encouragement offered by the award will help you continue your work and activism. We appreciate what you are doing for the global community."

"You are in distinguished company."

Iraqi LGBT spokesperson Ali Hili said: "This has come as a complete surprise and we are very honoured, particularly to be amongst such esteemed other awardees both this year and previously."

"Unfortunately we are unable to travel to accept the award in person [at the 2010 Lambda Literary Awards Ceremony in New York] as my travel is restricted by the British government, so the Trust has posted it to us."

Following Monette's instructions, there are no applications for the awards. Recommendations are given by an Advisory Committee to Monette's appointed Trustee, his brother Robert L. Monette.

Paul Monette and Roger Horwitz were committed to bringing about an end to homophobia both through their individual activities and through their union.

Roger Horwitz wrote poetry in his student years and received his undergraduate degree from Brandeis University, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. His first jobs were in France teaching English and then working for the publishers Larousse and Gallimard. He received his Ph.D in comparative literature from Harvard University in 1972, writing his dissertation on French novelist Henri Thomas as he also began Harvard Law School. He received his law degree in 1973.

Paul Monette was an honors student at Phillips Academy in Andover, MA and received his undergraduate degree in English from Yale in 1967, where he was Class Poet. Monette and Horwitz met September 4, 1974 in Boston, during the middle years of gay liberation. As he described their introduction in Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story (1992), Paul Monette said to Roger Horwitz, "Say hello to the rest of your life."

Paul and Roger moved to Los Angeles in November 1977, and both men were associated strongly with the LGBT activities of that city until their deaths. Horwitz worked as a corporate attorney, then founded his own practice with clients such as the Downtown Women's Center. He succumbed to AIDS in 1986. After Roger's death, Monette did the writing and activism for which he will remain known, capturing in his verse, fiction, non-fiction, fable, and public speaking appearances, the hopes, dreams, and rage of an entire generation.

Before his own death from AIDS in 1995, Monette established the Monette-Horwitz Trust to ensure the continued fruits of their activism as well as the memory of their loving partnership.

The other awardees are: the transsexual 'warrior' Leslie Feinberg; Impact Stories, which is a Californian oral history project; the Rev. Eric P. Lee, president of the Los Angeles chapter of Southern Christian Leadership Conference; Naz Foundation, the largest AIDS healthcare NGO in India, and; RFD and White Crane Journal, America's two oldest reader-written-and-produced quarterlies celebrating queer diversity.

Amnesty International: Iraq must protect civilians at risk of deadly violence

2010-04-27T11:19:00.001+01:00

27 April 2010

Amnesty International on Tuesday called on the Iraqi authorities to urgently step up the protection of civilians amid the recent surge of deadly violence in the country.

A new Amnesty International report, Iraq: Civilians Under Fire, documents how hundreds of civilians are being killed or injured each month.

Many are specifically targeted by armed groups because of their religious, ethnic or sexual identity or because they speak out against human rights abuses.

Ongoing uncertainty over when a new Iraqi government will be formed has led to a recent spike in attacks, with more than 100 civilian deaths in the first week of April alone.

"Iraqis are still living in a climate of fear, seven years after the US-led invasion. The Iraqi authorities could do much more to keep them safe, but over and over they are failing to help the most vulnerable in society," said Malcolm Smart, director of Amnesty International's Middle East and North Africa programme.

Amnesty International urged the authorities to do more to protect those who are particularly at risk and bring those responsible for violent crimes to justice, without recourse to the death penalty.

While Iraqi security forces, foreign troops or family members are responsible for some human rights abuses, most killings of civilians are carried out by armed groups, including al-Qa'ida in Iraq. The organization remains a significant presence in the country despite the recent reported deaths of three senior leaders.

Human rights defenders, journalists and political activists are among those who have been killed or maimed in Iraq because of their work.

Omar Ibrahim Al-Jabouri, the head of public relations at Rasheed TV station, only just escaped with his life in an attack on 13 April 2010. He lost his legs after being caught in an explosion of a bomb attached to his vehicle as he was driving to his office in Baghdad.

Religious and ethnic minorities also continue to be targeted for attack, with at least eight Christians killed in Mosul in February 2010 in apparent sectarian attacks.

Christian students Zia Toma, 22, and Ramsin Shmael, 21, were stopped by unidentified gunmen on 17 February 2010 at a bus stop in Mosul who demanded to see their identity cards. When the gunmen opened fire, Toma was killed and Shmael was injured but survived.

Women and girls are particularly at risk of violence from both armed groups and their relatives. Few men are known to have been convicted of rape in Iraq. Women frequently suffer at the hands of relatives, in so-called honour crimes, if their behaviour is seen to go against traditional moral codes, for instance by refusing to marry men who have been selected for them. Activists have also been targeted for speaking out in favour of women's rights.

Members of the gay community in Iraq, where homosexuality is not tolerated, live under constant threat of violence, with some Muslim clerics urging their followers to attack suspected homosexuals.

Authorities frequently fail to carry out thorough and impartial investigations into attacks on civilians, arrest suspects or bring perpetrators to justice. In some cases, they are even accused of being implicated in violent attacks.

As a result of the ongoing insecurity, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, including a disproportionately high number of minority communities, have been forced to flee their homes. Internally displaced people and refugees are even more vulnerable to violence, as well as economic hardship.

Amnesty International called on the Iraqi authorities to immediately introduce measures to improve the safety of civilians. They should consult with members of at-risk groups to see how best they can protect them.

In the meantime, the organization said the authorities must begin properly investigating attacks on civilians and to hold perpetrators, whoever they are, responsible for their crimes in accordance with international law. They should immediately disarm all militias and end the identification of religious affiliation on identity cards.

All armed groups in Iraq should immediately end human rights abuses, including attacks against civilians, abductions and torture.

Amnesty International also called for an end to all forcible returns of refugees to Iraq as long as the country remains unstable. Several European governments are forcibly returning people to Iraq – including to the most dangerous parts of the country – in direct violation of guidelines set out by UNHCR, the UN refugee agency.

Amnesty International has spoken to several Iraqis who were forcibly returned by the Netherlands government on 30 March 2010. Among the 35 refugees was a 22-year-old Shi'a Turkoman man from Tal Afar, a city north of Mosul, where hundreds of civilians have been killed in sectarian or other politically motivated violence in recent years, and where the violence continues unabated. As of mid-April, he remained stranded in Baghdad.

"The continuing uncertainty as to when a new government will be formed following last month's election could well contribute to a further increase of violent incidents of which civilians are the main victims. The uncertainty is threatening to make a bad situation even worse. Both the Iraqi authorities and the international community must act now to prevent more unnecessary deaths," said Malcolm Smart.

Iraq: Civilians under fire

Read the report's section 'attacks on gay men'

Members of the gay community in Iraq live under constant threat. They are confronted by widespread intolerance towards their sexual identity and scores of men who were, or were perceived to be, gay have been killed in recent years, some after torture. Violent acts against gay men have occurred against a background of frequent public statements by some Muslim clerics and others condemning homosexuality.

Attacks against gay men, including killings, have frequently been reported since the 2003 invasion.

Qassim, a 40-year-old hairdresser from Baghdad and refugee in Jordan, told Amnesty International in June 2006 about several incidents targeting gay men that occurred in August and September 2004 in Baghdad:

“I was at a gym with my boyfriend. When he returned to my car to get me a bottle of water he was shot dead outside the gym. I was terrified and went into hiding.”

About two weeks later two of his friends were killed in Baghdad. A few days later an explosive device was thrown at his car and he decided to leave Iraq.

The UN reported that at least 12 people were killed because of their sexual orientation between October 2005 and May 2006, during which a fatwa appeared on the website of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani calling for the killing of homosexuals “in the most severe way”.

During the first few months of 2009 at least 25 men and boys were killed in Baghdad because of their sexual orientation or gender expression. This was most common in the predominantly Shi’a district of al-Sadr City. According to reports, the perpetrators were their relatives and members of the Mahdi Army, followers of Moqtada al-Sadr, a Shi'a cleric and political leader.

Many of the victims were tortured and their bodies mutilated and dumped in the streets. Many other men and boys fled Iraq after receiving death threats.

In April 2009 Amnesty International interviewed several Iraqis who had recently fled due to the violence they were facing because they were gay men. Hakim, a 34-year-old man from Najaf, reported that his partner had been kidnapped and abused by members of the Mahdi Army in October 2008, apparently after they found out about their secret relationship. Following his release, both men received death threats from the Mahdi Army, including on one occasion a note that was delivered with three bullets.

A 41-year-old gay man from the Hayy Ur district of Baghdad told Human Rights Watch that a friend of his, a gay man, was attacked and killed in February 2009 by members of the Mahdi Army while he was walking in the neighbourhood with friends. The man himself later survived an abduction by members of the Mahdi Army, who forced him at gunpoint out of his store on 6 March 2009. During his abduction, the militia abused him, including by beating him unconscious and raping him with a broomstick. He was released after his family paid a ransom, but the abductors threatened to kill him if he left the house after his return. For one month he did not leave the house until he fled Baghdad.

The wave of attacks on gay men in early 2009 coincided with statements by Muslim clerics, particularly in al-Sadr City, urging their followers to take action to eradicate homosexuality from Iraqi society. They used language that effectively constituted incitement to violence against men known or alleged to be gay.

Licensed to kill gay men

Gay men face similar discrimination as women under the legislation that provides for lenient sentences for those committing crimes with an “honourable motive”. Iraqi courts continue to interpret provisions of Article 128 of the Penal Code as justification for giving drastically reduced sentences to defendants who have attacked or even killed gay men they are related to if they say that they acted to “wash off the shame”. In its rulings, the Iraqi Court of Cassation has confirmed that the killing of a male relative who is suspected of same-sex sexual conduct is considered a crime with an “honourable motive", thus qualifying for a reduced sentence under Article 128.16

Although provisions under Articles 128 have been amended in the Kurdistan Region by Law 14 of 2002 and, therefore, may no longer be applied in connection with crimes committed against women there, they continue to be applicable throughout the whole of Iraq in connection with crimes against gay men.

For example, on 24 October 2005 the Court of Cassation of the Kurdistan Region confirmed the conviction for murder and one-year prison sentence imposed on a man from Koysinjak who had confessed to killing his gay brother earlier in 2005. The court found that he had killed his brother with "honourable motives" because he "wanted to end the shame which the victim [of the crime] had brought over his family by practicing depravity and by being engaged in homosexuality and prostitution.” The court also accepted that a one-year prison sentence was in this case appropriate for premeditated murder, a crime which carries the death penalty.

Impunity or, at most, a disproportionately lenient prison sentence for the murder of gay men by their relatives, appears to be the rule rather than the exception in Iraq.

No Protection

A group of gay men reportedly provide emergency shelter at secret locations in Baghdad for individuals who are at risk. However, members of the gay community under threat of attack or murder cannot expect any assistance from the authorities, even when urgent protection is needed.

On the contrary, members of the security forces and possibly other authorities appear in some cases to have encouraged the targeting of people suspected of same-sex relationships, in blatant violation of the law and international human rights standards. For example, a senior police officer in the Karada district of Baghdad was reported to have told the media that “homosexuality is against the law" and that the police were involved in a "campaign to clean up the streets and get the beggars and homosexuals off them."

Ali Hili campaign update

2010-04-26T16:21:00.000+01:00

First campaign coverage in Middle East, first direct comment by government on case

Labour's election web campaign supremo asks Johnson to act
1000 sign petition in fortnight, hundreds of letters to Johnson

A major middle east news source has written about the campaign for Ali Hili and Iraqi LGBT, the first major news outlet for the region to cover the campaign.

The Media Line also secured the first direct comment on Hili's case from the UK government. They said that it is being dealt with by UK Border Agency (UKBA) Case Resolution Directorate and “the reason it hasn’t been prioritised is because it doesn’t fall into one of the priority categories listed on our website.”

When applying for his case to be prioritised, Hili's solicitor Barry O'Leary explained that he needed to travel to fulfill speaking engagements which would directly aid lesbians, gays, bisexual and transgender people (LGBT) suffering terror in Iraq through publicising their cause.

Six months later, and interpreting those "priority categories", the UKBA told O'Leary that:

the assistance which Hili has given to the Foreign Office (and mentioned in their 2009 Human Rights Report) "does not count"
the fatwa (death threat against him) does not mean that Hilli "falls within the classification of clear and immediate vulnerability"
that the delay in deciding Hilli's asylum case (since July 2007) "is not in itself an exceptional circumstance"
his case is not "compelling"

The UKBA explanation is in contradiction to the response given to MP Clare Short, prompted to write by a constituent. She was told by Gail Adams, West Midlands Regional Director of the UKBA that "information contained in applications to the UKBA is treated as being strictly confidential and is not normally disclosed to third parties."

Campaigners are determined to get the British Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, to intervene and order Hili's case prioritised - as he is able to do.

They would like it to become an issue in the UK election.
They say that the lack of resolution and consequent inability to travel and meet politicians and journalists in places such as Washington DC, Brussels and Madrid directly affects LGBT who are suffering a pogrom which continues in the country.

Iraqi LGBT say they will be releasing a video next month which addresses the ongoing campaign against LGBT, particularly in Iraq's south, a region formally under the control of the British. They say that in recent weeks there have been a number of murders of young gays.

Within a fortnight of the launch of the campaign, over 1000 people have signed an international petition. Over 250 mainly Americans have used change.org to send a message demanding intervention from the UK Home Secretary. Campaigners say they are aware of over 100 other letters going to both Alan Johnson and Gordon Brown.

And Iraqi LGBT have been informed that a number of MPs have asked Johnson to act, including the head of Labour's web campaign for the general election Kerry McCarthy, Labour MP for Bristol East.
The author Stella Duffy posted a link to the campaign on her Facebook page.

Besides The Media Line, a number of other blogs and websites covering Iraq have featured the case and support has come from many Iraqis.

Further coverage of Hili's case and the plight of LGBT in Iraq has come from a wide variety of media around the world.

For further information please email paul@iraqilgbt.org.uk

~~~~~~

The Media Line: Published Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Iraqi Gay Pleads to UK: Give Me Asylum

Written by Rachelle Kliger

Supporters of an Iraqi gay activist are pressing the UK government to grant him asylum papers so he can continue to promote rights of the Iraqi LGBT community.

Gay rights supporters have launched a campaign pressuring the UK government to grant asylum to a prominent Iraqi gay rights activist who has fled to Britain.

Ali Hili, director of Iraqi LGBT, an organization that promotes the rights of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender population in Iraq, fled Iraq to Europe in 2000 for personal reasons. He has been in the UK since 2002.

Although Hili, 37, applied for asylum status three years ago, his request is still pending. As a consequence, Hili, who is considered one of the few brave visible leaders of the Iraqi gay community, cannot leave the UK. He said this hampers his efforts to convey to the world the plight of gays in Iraq.

“There’s a general atmosphere of hostility and ignorance by the UK immigration authority,” Hili told The Media Line from his current residence in England. “I urgently need to travel and publicly speak, present our work, campaign and raise funds. We’re the first LGBT group in the Middle East so we should get support from Western governments and not be treated like this. It’s a human rights issue and not just a gay rights issue.”

Iraqi LGBT was set up five years ago to help organize escape routes and safe houses for Iraqi gays in danger and help members of Iraq’s LGBT community who are facing death and persecution by the Iraqi police and militias. It also aims to raise awareness about the wave of homophobic murders in Iraq to the outside world.

Iraqi LGBT estimates that over 700 lesbians, gays bisexuals and transgenders have been assassinated in Iraq in recent years.

Campaigners say that the decision to not prioritize his application not only impacts on Hili but also on persecuted Iraqi lesbians and gays, “through the reduced ability of their sole visible leader to raise their profile internationally.”

Hili argues that he is in a minority group at risk and he needs his asylum application to be approved so that he can travel and promote the objectives of his organization.

“My work with Iraqi LGBT has been delayed and everything is on hold. We’re unable to move, speak or to present our group to the world. We’re stuck here, while we get invitations from Europe, the U.S. and other countries who want to know more about the LGBT community in Iraq so it’s disrupting everything for us and throwing the group’s work down the drain,” he said.

The UK Border Agency told The Media Line that the case is being dealt with by Case Resolution Directorate.

“The reason it hasn’t been prioritised is because it doesn’t fall into one of the priority categories listed on our website,” a representative of the organization said.

Campaigners are gathering signatures for a petition at this link: http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/iraqi-lgbt-need-your-help/sign.html

Michael Luongo, a freelance journalist and editor of Gay Travels in the Muslim World, said he believes Hili is right to ask for preferential treatment in his asylum application.

“Not only is he a gay Iraqi, he is one heading an organization, so the fact that he has not received asylum yet is baffling,” he told The Media Line. “What is the British government thinking?”

In addition, Luongo pointed out that the results of the recent parliamentary elections in Iraq indicate that hard-line political forces - who may well have been behind the murders of gays in Iraq - are now gaining political strength. This poses an increased threat to the gay community in Iraq.

Hili, who will not reveal his real name for reasons of personal safety, said that life for gays has actually better under Saddam Hussein and has severely deteriorated since 2003.

“[Under Saddam] I never suffered from the law on account of my sexual inclinations. I enjoyed tolerance and even respect by the people, society, friends, relatives and work colleagues,” Hili said.

Under Saddam, he added, the law imposed between six months and three years in jail for homosexual acts but these punishments were rarely enforced.

“We never experienced any killings or executions by the authorities,” he said.

Now, witnesses have testified of extreme violence in Iraq against sexual minorities. Officials have denied this, but Hili said they have proof it is occurring.

“We have clear evidence that the Iraqi police are participating in killings, and we can prove this with videos and documents,” he said. “We’ve also heard of lots of religious fundamental leaders urging their followers to track down homosexuals and beat and kill them. It’s far worse than we ever experienced in the past.”

As to the legislative situation today, Hili said the current Iraqi constitution made no reference to the gay community whatsoever.

“The new constitution doesn’t have criminal courts or regulations. We don’t even exist in the constitution. We believe that by not mentioning anything, this is evidence that we do not exist in the eye of the Iraqi constitution or the Iraqi state. We need to set that right.”

Interestingly, Luongo said that even though gays were better off under Saddam’s regime, the 2003 invasion also brought about changes that opened up the Iraqi gay community to the world.

“The invasion allowed for increased interaction between the Western gay world and the gay world of Iraq,” he explained, “either through employees at NGO's, gay soldiers, and other gay Westerners who came to work in occupied Iraq.”

Luongo, who has traveled to Iraq twice since 2003 and is familiar with the issue, said the “scene” in Iraq was nothing like a scene in the Western sense.

“I visited a cafe in Western Baghdad that had maybe 100 men in it, a cafe that has a gay reputation. There are a few such places in the city. However, the places like this which existed in Sadr City, a very conservative religious area, were firebombed and men who went were hunted down. To give some indication of the size of the gay community in exile, when I visited Damascus in Syria and interviewed gay men there, they told me that there were 9,000 gay Iraqi men in the city - half of whom came to flee the anti-gay violence of Baghdad on their own, and half of whom came along with their families, fleeing the general violence.”

Mirroring Hili’s comments Luongo said gays in Iraq are not at all tolerated in the current climate.

“I interviewed a woman from the government who was very liberal, and her view was that gays had to be more discreet in order to save themselves,” he said.

“What I found within Iraqi society is everything from deep hatred of gays to mild amusement to people who had friends they figured were gay but just never talked about it. You might think of it like the USA or the UK in the 1960's but with an exceedingly more violent tendency towards gays.”

Ironically, Luongo said the Arabic version of his book, which discusses gays in the Muslim world, was available for sale in a bookseller’s bazaar in Baghdad, reflecting the contrasting tendencies in the city.

Iraq 7 Years Later: A Journey of Return

2010-04-04T10:06:00.001+01:00

Seven years after the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, New Internationalist co-editor Hadani Ditmars returned to a land she last visited in October 2003 to research her book Dancing in the No Fly Zone.

With more than a million people dead in the wake of post-invasion violence, infrastructure in ruins despite $53 billion dollars in ‘aid’, rampant corruption and continuing human rights abuses, the promise of democracy remains a hollow one.

But there are signs of life amidst the devastation. The national theatre has re-opened, women continue to defy oppressive fundamentalism, and young people dream of a better future, where a renewed sense of national identity trumps sectarian divisions.

Join Hadani for the launch of the May issue on Iraq, as well as a lively discussion on the country’s future with special guests Hassan Abdulrazzak, who wrote the play Baghdad Wedding, gay rights activist Ali Hili, and writer Haifa Zangana.

Date: April 29, 2010 7:00 PM
Frontline Club
13 Norfolk Place,
London W2 1QJ
Tel: +44 (0)20 7479 8950
Moved to Hellenic Centre
16-18 Paddington St, Marylebone, W1U 5AS
Closest Tube Station: Paddington

Ali must travel! - Support from LGBT Iraqis

2010-04-01T15:57:00.002+01:00

Just some of the comments left on the petition.

all my life i live as girl who like girls and hide my feeling until read online about ali work iraqilgbt and finds there are so many others like me in iraq.
ali we want you to know that all lesbians iraqis are proud because of your great works and your tireless efort to stand up for us.
yes we can not show our faces but at least we have a man who advocate and presents us and yes ali the voice of the lesbians comunity of iraq we all behinds you.

Please please help give Ali his right to travel to suport our group and underground work in iraq , situation is extremly dangerous here i can tell you that iraq police araesting and killing gay men in day light and no one do anything about it.

a word from the south of iraq for the man who give us hopes of living with heads up in the sky , before ali group we all afraid and shamed of who we are.
No one belive that there will be group to support for gay mans in iraq in all history.

Ali, remember that you are our hero .

My heart and thought with you ali, please stay strong. i know you can.

Yes Ali, we all love you and wish you all the best, without your support and encouregmant , i could never stand up and shout i'm lesbian and proud.

we all love you ali here, what you did for gay men in iraq was something nobody will do in 100 year.

You are the pride of Iraq, pwoplw like you make history, you deserve best and all respect from me.

please let ali travel and support lgbt people in iraq, his work is very important to us.

You saved my life twice, this is a simple way from me to thank you mr. ali.
you are my hero. love from karam

you are my hero ali, i pray for you

Ali , you helpd me alot, this is my way to support you and say thank you

This man is a hero in the middle east, we all support his asylum claim in the UK.
YOU DO NOT UNDER STAND IT IS IMPOSIBLE TO BE GAY AND OUT IN MUSLIM COUNTRIES .
IT IS A DEATH SENTENCE.

Thank you for your help in my asylum case, you deserve to get asylum more than anyone of us.

Proud to be British Iraqi Lesbian woman and i fully support Ali's claim , Have mercy on this great human being.

a message of support from inside iraq, ali you are our hero, our hope and the future you have in your vision for a better iraq will come one day, believe me.
Please keep the faith, your fight is our fight, we all dream of a better world, a world with all people respect and love each other...

My heart with you my friend, i still can not believe this.
As Iraqi woman i find this so cruel to keep people waiting for three years while the evidence is there [Iraq is so dangerous for everyone , not mention gay men].

I was so lucky to know this man, he is my chilhood friend, a great inspiration and a unique strong personality stood out of the crowd, a determination for living life and bring a smile to everyone he knows.
He helped many many orphans and children in the 90's . May Allah protect you habibi.

Because of this man, i was able to accept myself as an Iraqi lesbian woman, i contacted ali in 2007 and he convince me to live and not to commit suicide, he gave me hope and life and now i'm proud to be a soldier in ali's army to bring respect and understanding to our society...ali my heart and thought with you, please stay in uk we need you there it is more much importnat than you be here. This brave and courages man is a real hero, not politicians who destroyed Iraq. Ali gave hopes to millions inside Iraq of a better future, of new future where many lgbt people lives in hiding for thousands of years, without Ali's work we could never get the courage to come out and be proud

Support from the UK Iraq Solidarity campaign and Women Living Under Muslim Laws

Change.org launch petition for Iraqi LGBT

2010-03-31T09:32:00.002+01:00

Iraqi LGBT

Press statement
For immediate use
31 March

Change.org launch petition for Iraqi LGBT

Green leader writes to Johnson

Gay Iraqis praise 'our hero'

The major American progressive organisation Change.org has launched a petition to British Home Secretary Alan Johnson to grant asylum to Iraqi LGBT leader Ali Hili.

The petition allows supporter to send a personalised message to Johnson, whose decision is effecting the work of the group in drawing attention to atrocities against gays in Iraq. It was created by the website's leading gay author Michael Jones.

A petition started by Iraqi LGBT has already drawn near 700 signatures in a few days, including many with moving comments from Iraqis who have been helped by Hili.

One was from Khaldoon Abdulrazaq who wrote:

"A message of support from inside iraq, ali you are our hero, our hope and the future you have in your vision for a better iraq will come one day, believe me. Please keep the faith, your fight is our fight, we all dream of a better world, a world with all people respect and love each other..."

Campaign organisers say that 60 letters have already been sent to Gordon Brown demanding he intervene.

On Monday the leader of the UK Green Party Caroline Lucas announced that she had written to Johnson.

Lucas wrote:

"I am writing with reference to the asylum application of Iraqi LGBT leader Ali Hili, currently living in exile in London. This application has been outstanding for nearly three years and while it is outstanding, Ali cannot travel. This impacts not only on Ali himself but also limits his ability to raise the profile of how LGBT rights are oppressed on a daily basis in Iraq."

"As I am sure you are aware, the group Iraqi LGBT estimates that over 700 LGBT people have been assassinated over the past few years. Human Rights Watch, working with the BBC for a report aired last year, confirmed that torture and persecution of the LGBT community is widespread and that many LGBT people claim life was safer during Saddam Hussein's regime. US Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin spoke last month of their concerns for LGBT both in Iraq and as refugees, in a letter to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton co-signed by 64 other Congress people."

"Ali Hili, as a prominent campaigner for LGBT equality, will not be safe if he is returned to Iraq. He has received a fatwa from inside Iraq, as well as numerous threats in London which have forced him to move. He is under the protection of the Metropolitan Police. Moreover, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has advised 'favourable consideration' for asylum claims because of the situation in Iraq. I would, therefore, urge you to ensure that Ali Hili's asylum claim is granted as a matter of urgency and his right to travel guaranteed."

Documentary film maker David Grey of Village Films has released an appeal for Ali and Iraqi LGBT on YouTube. The video is titled 'Please help save gay lives in Iraq'.

Campaigners for Hili said that they were awaiting confirmation of further invitations to travel - Hili was asked to do a speaking tour of the United States last year but had to decline.

Hili's solicitor, Barry O'Leary, wrote to the UK Border Agency (UKBA) in August 2009 that: "he desperately wishes to do this [travel] in order to further the aims of his organisation, that is, supporting lesbians and gay men in Iraq and bringing the world's attention to their plight."

Six months after his review application, the UKBA told O'Leary that:

    * the assistance which Hili has given to the Foreign Office "does not count"
    * the fatwa against him does not mean that Hili "falls within the classification of clear and immediate vulnerability"
    * that the delay in deciding Hili's asylum case (since July 2007) "is not in itself an exceptional circumstance"
    * his case is not "compelling"

O'Leary said: "I have made UKBA aware of the detriment the nearly three year delay is having on the work of Iraqi LGBT. I have also stressed that this will be a straightforward matter given Mr Hili’s very high profile and the documented risks to his life. Nevertheless they decided to leave him in the queue for a decision. This can only harm LGBT individuals in Iraq."

ENDS

For further information and requests for interviews and photographs contact:
gayasylumuk@gmail.com or call (UK) 07986 008420

For comment on the legal issues contact:

Barry O'Leary
Wesley Gryk Solicitors

Iraqi LGBT website

Video: Please help save lives in Iraq

2010-03-30T09:40:00.001+01:00

Many thanks to David Grey.

Caroline Lucas MEP says Ali Must Travel!

2010-03-29T15:06:00.000+01:00

The leader of the UK Green Party Caroline Lucas MEP has written to Home Secretary Alan Johnson to support the asylum claim of Iraqi LGBT leader Ali Hili.

Caroline Lucas

Ali must travel! What people are saying

2010-03-25T19:49:00.003Z

Photo by Stefan Ferreira

Comments on the interwebs ...

From pinknews:

Well, lets put the matter to the test, shall we? I have contacted my MP (Ben Bradshaw) and we will see what his response is, and what YOUR MP's response is!
Matt B

From the petition:

It is very hard and dangerous for LGBT people in Iraq to speak out about the exceptional violence and discrimination being meted out to them. Ali Hili is a clear and articulate spokesperson for their plight and being outside the country (and able to travel) is the most likely to be effective in bringing about change and justice. Please, Mr Johnson, reconsider this decision.
Vanessa Baird

I work for a charity, Slough Refugee Support, and daily see the misery caused by the delays in settling outstanding asylum claims. In the case of Ali Hili the delay is not just affecting him, but his cause of human rights for LGBT people in Iraq, so I would ask you to see this as a compelling case for action by the Home Office.
Rosemary Watson

To think that Mr. Hill is not under threat if returned to Iraq is absolutely wrong. I serve in the United States Military and currently in the Middle East. I see, know and understand exactly the threat to Mr. Hill. It is real. If you don't believe then come and see for yourself or better yet be known yourself in the community as being same-gengered oriented and see what threats on your life will transpire. Then you will think twice and defend. Horror exist and to deny this is evil and sinful.
Christopher Myers

The UK government should be ashamed of itself. The UK parliament has many gay and lesbian members and they should be supporting this Iraqi gay rights activist with all the power they can muster. Gordon Brown must remember that human rights are indivisible!!
Mannie DeSaxe

Ali Hili is the most credible international spokesperson about the desperate situation facing Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender people in Iraq. A year ago our organization attempted to bring Mr. Hili to the United States -- birthplace of the illegal occupation that has caused Iraqi LGBTs so much pain. That his voice is not able to be heard in the U.S. is an afront to the values that both Britain and U.S. claim to uphold.
Andy Thayer

This clearly needs attention; if you can travel you can be the international voice of Iraqi LGBT.
Robin Pitts

Because of this man, i was able to accept myself as an Iraqi lesbian woman, i contacted ali in 2007 and he convince me to live and not to commit suicide, he gave me hope and life and now i'm proud to be a soldier in ali's army to bring respect and understanding to our society...ali my heart and thought with you, please stay in uk we need you there it is more much importnat than you be here.
Rana

Hili's work in informing the global community of what is happening in Iraq, and the life threatening situation for Iraqi LGBTs, has been invaluable. Hili must be allowed to continue this work and to do so, his asylum claim should be expedited with immediacy. To disregard this as a non-urgent matter fundamentally misunderstands the pressing danger that all LGBT Iraqis face. Please, take action now. Thank you.
Stephen Busfield

This brave and courages man is a real hero, not politicians who destroyed Iraq. Ali gave hopes to millions inside Iraq of a better future , of new future where many lgbt people lives in hiding for thousands of years, without Ali's work we could never get the courage to come out and be proud
Hasan

a message of support from inside iraq, ali you are our hero, our hope and the future you have in your vision for a better iraq will come one day, believe me. Please keep the faith, your fight is our fight, we all dream of a better world, a world with all people respect and love each other...
Khaldoon

Outrage as UK government refuses to take action on asylum application by Iraqi gay leader

2010-03-24T02:25:00.000Z

Press statement
24 March 2010

For immediate use

Outrage as UK government refuses to take action on asylum application by Iraqi gay leader

Action demanded of Gordon Brown and Alan Johnson

Foreign Office opposition to persecution undermined by Home Office actions

The UK government through its Border Agency has refused to give priority to an application for asylum by the leader of Iraqi LGBT, Ali Hili, in exile in London. The application has been outstanding for nearly three years and while it is outstanding, he cannot travel.

This decision directly impacts on harshly persecuted Iraqi lesbians and gays through the reduced ability of their sole visible leader to raise their profile internationally.

US Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin spoke last month of their concerns for LGBT both in Iraq and as refugees, in a letter to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton co-signed by 64 other Congresspeople.

Numerous human rights organisations and journalists have documented the pogrom against lesbians and gays in Iraq. Human Rights Watch has described a "campaign of torture and murder". Iraqi LGBT estimates that over 700 LGBT have been assassinated over the past few years. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has advised 'favourable consideration' for asylum claims because of the situation.

Hili has received many requests to speak about the situation in Iraq internationally, including from US-based groups such as the Gay Liberation Network and the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Campaign, which he has been unable to pursue.

His solicitor, Barry O'Leary, wrote to the UK Border Agency (UKBA) in August 2009 that: "he desperately wishes to do this [travel] in order to further the aims of his organisation, that is, supporting lesbians and gay men in Iraq and bringing the world's attention to their plight."

Six months after his review application, the UKBA told O'Leary that:

the assistance which Hili has given to the Foreign Office "does not count"
the fatwa against him does not mean that Hili "falls within the classification of clear and immediate vulnerability"
that the delay in deciding Hili's asylum case (since July 2007) "is not in itself an exceptional circumstance"
his case is not "compelling"

O'Leary said: "I have made UKBA aware of the detriment the nearly three year delay is having on the work of Iraqi LGBT. I have also stressed that this will be a straightforward matter given Mr Hili’s very high profile and the documented risks to his life. Nevertheless they decided to leave him in the queue for a decision. This can only harm LGBT individuals in Iraq."

As the public leader of the only group representing lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people both in Iraq as well as the diaspora, Hili has received a fatwa from inside Iraq as well as numerous threats in London which have forced him to move. He is under the protection of the Metropolitan Police.

Hili said: "It is extremely distressing that the British government is refusing to allow me to take up the many offers to speak on behalf of the lesbians and gays in our organisation. I have been the only person who has willingly identified themselves as a gay Iraqi and this has made me a target. But the British government doesn't take this seriously."

"Why are they undermining the work of our group? Why does the Foreign Office say it supports lesbians and gays around the world yet the Home Office does this to me,” he asks?

Foreign Office Minister Chris Bryant wrote in his blog on Feb. 24: "I know some people dismiss LGBT rights as something of a sideshow in international relations, but I am proud to say that the FCO has argued for a decade that human rights are a seamless garment."

The Foreign Office Human Rights Report for 2009 specifically names Iraqi LGBT over other NGOs as a key source of information. Hili has met with them numerous times. The report quotes Foreign Office Minister Bill Rammell condemming persecution of LGBT in Iraq.

Yet the same government through the Home Office effectively aids that persecution through the failure of recognition to Iraqi LGBT's leader.

Hili's supporters said that they would be taking the campaign to get his case decided - so Iraqi lesbians and gays can have a voice in the world - to the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary Alan Johnson.

The internationally renowned human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell has said of Hili:

"It was Ali Hili of Iraqi LGBT who first alerted the world to the organised killing of LGBT people in Iraq - way back in 2005. For a long time, he was a lone voice."

"Soon afterwards, he exposed the death fatwa against LGBT people issued by Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

"Mr Hili was also the person who set up the 'underground railroad' and safe houses inside Iraq, to give refuge to LGBT people on the run from Islamist death squads and to provide escape routes to neighbouring countries - which saved the lives of many Iraqi LGBTs.

"While I would not wish to detract one iota from the contributions of others, it is important to show due generosity and humility by acknowledging that it was Ali Hili and Iraqi LGBT who first bought this issue to public consciousness. They deserve our gratitude."

Paul Canning, Editor of LGBT Asylum News and a Hili supporter, said: "If Ali is not deserving of expediency in decision making I don't know who is."

"The government should be 100% behind the work of Iraqi LGBT, indeed they are quite willing to accept their help and advice at the Foreign Office. But they treat Ali and, through him Iraqi lesbians and gays, like dirt who don't deserve our protection and support. It is completely outrageous."

Iraqi LGBT have set up a campaign web page on their website, see http://bit.ly/alihili

ENDS

For further information and requests for interviews and photographs contact:
gayasylumuk@gmail.com

For comment on the legal issues contact:

Barry O'Leary
Wesley Gryk Solicitors

Notes:

Iraqi LGBT is a representative organisation for over 100 people both inside Iraq and in the diaspora. It runs safe houses in Iraq and assists people to flee as well as supporting them in neighboring countries.

Queerty: Interview with Ali Hili
Iraqi LGBT website

Foreign Office: Annual Report on Human Rights
Human Rights Watch: Iraq: Stop Killings for Homosexual Conduct
Peter Tatchell: Iraq - Ayatolla Sistani says death to gays
LGBT Asylum News: Ministers Must Halt Deportation Of Gay Iraqi
BBC: Saddam's rule 'better' for gay Iraqis
LGBT Asylum News: Save LGBT refugees, 44 US congresspeople urge Hillary Clinton
LGBT Asylum News: I'm Gay and Iraqi: Please Help Me!

Iraqi LGBT annual report

Support for LGBT Iraqi Refugees

2010-02-05T08:19:00.000Z

Rep. Tammy Baldwin

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand

Source: Office of Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin - February 4

GILLIBRAND, BALDWIN TO SEC. CLINTON: SAVE LGBT REFUGEES

LGBT Individuals Tortured and Killed in Iraq in 2009

No Proper Investigations, No Arrests for Crimes Against LGBT Individuals in Iraq

Take Action to Enforce Human Rights Laws to Protect Members of the LGBT Community in Countries Where Their Rights Are Abused.

Washington, D.C. – With hundreds of LGBT individuals being beaten, persecuted and even killed in Iraq, Iran and other countries, U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), joined by 11 of their Senate colleagues and 31 of their House colleagues, today wrote to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urging her to work with U.S. Ambassadors, the United Nations and NGOs across the globe to enforce human rights laws that protect LGBT individuals in the countries where they are under threat. Where safe conditions are not possible, the U.S. and the UN must work with refugee and human rights groups to expedite refugees’ flight to safety.

According to Human Rights Watch, there is no official number of deaths since the killing of LGBT individuals began in Iraq, but the U.N. has provided rough estimates range in the hundreds in 2009 alone. Not one murder of an LGBT individual in Iraq has led to an arrest, according to Human Rights Watch.

“It is time for us in Congress to take a strong stand against all hate crimes and persecution – wherever they occur,” Senator Gillibrand said. “People in this world should not have to suffer or fear for their lives because of who they are or what they believe in. It is wrong and it must end. If Iraq, Iran and other countries are not providing the legal protections that members of their LGBT communities are entitled to, it is our duty to join with our partners in the international community, enforce the human rights laws that protect us all, and free LGBT individuals from persecution. While the ultimate goal is safe conditions in these countries, until that happens, the U.S., UN and the international community must ensure that LGBT refugees can reach safety in countries where they won’t face persecution”

“The lives of LGBT individuals in Iran and Iraq, as well as those LGBT refugees who have fled persecution, are in grave danger,” said Congresswoman Baldwin, Co-Chair of the Congressional LGBT Equality Caucus. “I know Secretary of State Clinton shares our concerns for human rights and I hope she will use the full force of her office to respond to the plight of Iraqi and Iranian LGBT refugees and urge the UNHRC to do the same,” Congresswoman Baldwin said.

“Senator Gillibrand’s letter highlights the difficulty that foreign lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) refugees face when their home countries, and their countries of first asylum, permit or condone discrimination and brutal attacks based on sexual orientation or gender identity,” said HRC President Joe Solmonese. “Secretary Clinton has said that LGBT rights are human rights and we agree. We look forward to working with the State Department and Senator Gillibrand to ensure that U.S. foreign policy strongly supports protecting the human rights of LGBT individuals abroad.”

“Today, these Members of Congress have presented a comprehensive set of recommendations that will help ensure the protection of individuals who flee persecution based on their sexual orientation or gender identity only to face further persecution and violence in the countries they have fled to in search of safe refuge,” said Human Rights First’s Eleanor Acer. “We praise their leadership on this issue, and urge the administration to implement these measures including a fast-track resettlement process for individuals facing serious protection risks.”

Gideon Aronoff, President & CEO of HIAS said, ““Refugees who have fled persecution on the basis of their sexuality are among the most vulnerable in the world, as persecution often follows them across borders from one country to the next. Additionally, in some parts of the world the LGBT population is at special risk because of strong cultural mores that reject and demonize all but traditional male/female relationships. For some, resettlement to the U. S. or another free country is the only life-saving solution, but neither the U.S. Refugee Program nor the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is adequately prepared to give LGBT refugees the access to safety which they so desperately need. The Congressional letter organized by Sen. Gillibrand to Secretary Clinton suggests sensible and concrete steps to save the lives of LGBT refugees, and we urge the Department of State to give these suggestions expeditious consideration.”

The letter is signed by:

Kirsten E. Gillibran, United States Senator
Patrick J. Leahy, United States Senator
Daniel K. Akaka, United States Senator
Jeff Bingaman, United States Senator
Sherrod Brown, United States Senator
Robert P. Casey Jr., United States Senator
Russell D. Feingold, United States Senator
Frank R. Lautenberg, United States Senator
Joseph L. Lieberma, United States Senator
Jeff Merkley, United States Senator
Charles E. Schumer, United States Senator
Ron Wyden, United States Senator
Tammy Baldwin, United States Representative
Jared Polis, United States Representative
Barney Frank, United States Representative
Jan Schakowsky, United States Representative
Jerrold Nadler, United States Representative
Michael M. Honda, United States Representative
Lois Capps, United States Representative
James P. Moran, United States Representative
Zoe Lofgren, United States Representative
David Wu, United States Representative
Edolphus Towns, United States Representative
Carolyn Maloney, United States Representative
Alcee Hastings, United States Representative
John Conyers, United States Representative
Luis Gutierrez, United States Representative
Bill Delahunt, United States Representative
Eliot Engel, United States Representative
Raúl M. Grijalva, United States Representative
Chellie Pingree, United States Representative
Joseph Crowley, United States Representative
Gary Ackerman, United States Representative
Anthony Weiner, United States Representative
Maurice Hinchey, United States Representative
Steven Rothman, United States Representative
James P. McGovern, United States Representative
Lynn Woolsey, United States Representative
Paul Tonko, United States Representative
Mike Quigley, United States Representative
Steve Israel, United States Representative
Howard Berman, United States Representative
Henry Waxman, United States Representative
Brad Sherman, United States Representative

Senator Gillibrand and Congresswoman Baldwin’s letter to Secretary Clinton is below:

LGBT Refugees Letter to Clinton 2-4-10

720 brutally murdered as 'gay cleansing' continues unchecked in Iraq

2009-11-16T23:28:00.002Z

An organization dedicated to securing asylum for LGBT refugees from Iraq estimates that over 720 LGBT men and women have been murdered by extremist militias in the last six years.
London-based Iraqi LGBT reports the Iraqi government has largely been absent in pursuing the roaming "death squads" in Iraq who seek out LGBT victims, likely due to the influence of extremist Shia religious parties that are calling for a moral cleansing of Iraq.

The organization says the rise of fundamentalist groups in Iraq since the 2003 U.S. invasion has proven deadly to LGBT Iraqis, who are now being forced to either hide or face the consequences. On its website, Iraqi LGBT says, "there is little hope for Iraqis suffering under the new socio-political climate. Once the most liberal and secular of the Arab nations, nowadays religious extremism has taken hold of the country to the detriment of its people."

The extremist groups and police were using the Internet to track down LGBT Iraqis this past summer, but at least two gay Iraqis were able to be saved by Iraqi LGBT. In August, police raided the houses of Asad Galib and Faeq Ismail, both 24 years old, and took them into custody. They were held and questioned for about four hours and accused of viewing gay websites in an internet café. Both men denied the accusations and explained that the websites had already been open when they began using the computers. They were later released and put in a safe house sponsored by Iraqi LGBT.

But the big question continues to be, why hasn't the U.S. government done anything to help? It is hearbreaking that Iraqi LGBT has to beg for donations on its website, instead of getting any form of help whatsoever from us to help stop the gay genocide in Iraq.

President Obama has remained completely silent on the issue, even after receiving a letter from Rep. Jared Polis urging his administration to take action, and a 67-page report by Human Rights Watch in August outlining in explicit detail the torture and murder of LGBT Iraqis, which was featured prominently in nearly every U.S. media outlet, including the New York Times and CNN. Since the HRW report was released, there hasn't been a single change in military strategy to protect LGBT Iraqis from the roaming death squads or the Iraqi police.

Better question - why haven't American LGBT people and their supporters expressed more outrage about the horrendous situation facing LGBT Iraqis? Are we so caught up in our own myopic obsession with equal rights here that we forget about the plight of our brothers and sisters in the (still) U.S.-occupied territory? Why aren't we doing more to try and help them? Why aren't we doing more to speak out on their behalf?

Iraqi LGBT is doing all it can, but being the only organization dedicated to helping gay Iraqis, it's difficult for them to make much of an impact. So far, Iraqi LGBT says nearly 100 individuals in Iraq have directly benefited from their work, and they have been involved in securing asylum for Iraqi refugees who have been forced to flee the country.

But so much more is needed.

http://www.examiner.com/x-4107-International-LGBT-Issues-Examiner~y2009m11d16-720-brutally-murdered-as-gay-cleansing-continues-unchecked-in-Iraq

TERROR CAMPAIGN AGAINST LESBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL AND TRANSGENDER IRAQIS CONTINUES UNCHECKED BY IRAQI GOVERNMENT

2009-11-15T23:49:00.003Z

IRAQI LGBT – November 2009 – The rise of fundamentalist groups in Iraq since the 2003 U.S. led invasion has proven deadly to LGBT Iraqis, who are now being forced to either hide or face the consequences.

Using the internet as a means to track down new victims, militia members are now employing computer analysts to monitor traffic on gay dating and networking websites in the region. They work with internet café owners to single out people who frequent these sites and set up fake profiles in the attempt to lure them out.

On the 28th of August, police raided the houses of Asad Galib and Faeq Ismail, both 24 years old, and took them into custody. They were held and questioned for about four hours, accused of viewing gay websites in an internet café on the 21st of July. Both men denied the accusations and explained that the websites had already been open when they had begun using the computers. They were later released and are now in contact with Iraqi LGBT, a London based organization working to support and protect LGBT individuals in Iraq.

Others who have been accused or are suspected of such activities have not been as lucky.

On the 2nd of September, the body of 21-year-old student Mizher Hussien was discovered in Al Najaf, a city south of Baghdad. His head and genitals had been severed, and he had the word “pervert” written in black across his chest. The details of his murder are unknown, and Iraqi police have refused to launch an investigation into the cause or motivation of the crime.

On the 18th of September in Al Shatra Amara, two bodies were found exhibiting signs of torture. They had both been decapitated and left with a paper stating, “This is the end of all pervert homosexuals”.

Iraqi LGBT has been working since 2003 to raise awareness of the abuses being committed against LGBT people in Iraq, as well as provide protection to those who have been targeted. The organization currently funds a number of safe houses in the region, with nearly 100 individuals in Iraq directly benefitting from their work. In addition, Iraqi LGBT has been involved in securing asylum for Iraqi refugees who have been forced to flee the country.

Unfortunately, Iraqi LGBT has not been able to help everyone. The organization estimates that over 720 LGBT men and women have been murdered by these extremist militias in the last six years. The Iraqi government has largely been absent in pursuing the roaming death squads who carry out these acts, likely due to the influence of extremist Shia religious parties that are calling for a moral cleansing of Iraq.

With extremist militias threatening all those known to support LGBT rights, including the 2006 raid of an Iraqi LGBT planning meeting in which five activists were arrested, there is little hope for Iraqis suffering under the new socio-political climate. Once the most liberal and secular of the Arab nations, nowadays a religious extremism has taken hold of the country to the detriment of its people.
Iraqi LGBT calls for immediate international action to prevent the further torture and execution of LGBT people in Iraq. More information and details on making donations to the safe houses effort can be found at our Iraqi LGBT blog

Support messages for Iraqi LGBT and Ali Hili

2009-10-12T22:53:00.000+01:00

The following messages were posted to the Euro-Queer and GaysWithoutBorders mailing lists.

Ali Hili and Iraqi LGBT send their thanks to Peter Tatchell, HIVOS and our friend Doug Ireland for making this happen.

~~~~~~~~~~

Thanks and appreciation to every individual and organisation that has supported and raised awareness of the plight of Iraqi LGBTs, and who has lobbied politicians and news editors to get stories on this issue published, like this excellent piece in the New York Times:

http://nymag.com/news/features/59695/

But I would also like to remind everyone that despite all the criticisms thrown at him, it was Ali Hili of Iraqi LGBT who first alerted the world to the organised killing of LGBT people in Iraq - way back in 2005. For a long time, he was a lone voice.

Although people have criticised Ali for various failings, he nevertheless deserves a great deal of praise for his pioneering, ground-breaking and life-saving work.

It is wonderful that Time Magazine, CNN and the New York Times have now reported the terrorisation of our LGBT sisters and brothers in Iraq, and that Human Rights Watch and other human rights organisations have produced some very powerful and valuable reports on the subject.

Our thanks to them.

While I would not wish to detract one iota from the contributions of others, I think it is also important that we should show due generosity and humility by acknowledging that it was Ali Hili and Iraqi LGBT who first bought this issue to public consciousness.They deserve our gratitude.

- Peter Tatchell

~~~~~~~~~~

As a journalist who, over the last four years, has written a great deal about the horrendous campaign of intimidation, torture, and murder targeting Iraqi gays, I want to associate myself with our friend Peter Tatchell's comments about the debt owed to Ali Hili and Iraqi LGBT for having brought the issue to the world's attention. Whatever criticisms one may make about Ali and the organization's management (and I've expressed a few in private to Ali myself) there is no question that he and Iraqi LGBT played the catalytic role with their research and their campaigning in putting this issue on the agenda of the media. It's taken a long time since I first wrote about the anti-gay death squads in Iraq four years ago for the mainstream U.S. media to begin to pay attention to this story -- the British press was on it much, much earlier -- and I'm glad to see that, even though some of the recent reporting has been flawed and incomplete, the heartrending plight of Iraqi queers is finally getting some of the attention it so urgently deserves. Without the groundbreaking work of Ali and Iraqi LGBT at the beginning, when even the human rights organizations weren't paying attention (they only recently got into all this, it must be noted) the current attention being paid would not be happening now.

--Doug Ireland, GAY CITY NEWS

Stop the deportation of Anwar Basim Saleh

2009-09-16T16:35:00.000+01:00

Image via Wikipedia

Source: EveryOne Group

Anwar Basim Saleh, the 21-year old Iraqi gay activist from Baghdad, is at present in Holland, where he has applied for asylum.

Anwar, before leaving his country of origin, was the coordinator of a “safe house” for homosexuals working alongside the Iraqi LGBT organization. He was arrested in February 2009 by members of the Iraqi Interior Ministry (Badr Corps) for his role in the association. He was badly beaten up, tortured and he suffered a serious trauma after the long period of detention and the abuse he was subjected to.

He was put under investigation and interrogated over and over again about his role as an LGBT activist and his involvement in the running of a “safe house” in Iraq, where persecuted homosexuals are secretly taken in and offered assistance.

During his detention he met five other members of this organization who have been sentenced to death for the same reason. During a visit to the jail of an Iraqi LGBT volunteer, Anwar handed over a letter with a desperate appeal: “save me from the death penalty.

Iraqi LGBT immediately paid the authorities 5,000 dollars in bail to obtain the young man’s release. As soon as he was released from jail on April 14th, 2009, Anwar immediately got on a plane to Paris, thus fleeing his homeland where he would have undergone an unjust trial, and would most likely have been sentenced to death.

After a few months without any help from the French institutions, associations and authorities (while begging on the streets and living as a tramp), Anwar (who speaks no other languages but his own) left France, and on June 22nd entered Dutch territory. He approached the police authorities in Rotterdam of his own accord, and after telling them his story, they sent him to the local refugee office, which gave him shelter at Terabil asylum centre on June 24th.

On September 2nd, 2009, Anwar was sent for by the Justice Ministry to discuss his asylum application, and was informed that according to the Dublin Regulation, it is up to France to decide whether or not to grant him refugee status.

Anwar, who is still in Holland, begged them to reconsider his application in Holland (where other homosexual originating from Arab countries have taken refuge) to avoid having to make yet another traumatic move and long wait before he learns his fate.

In the Iraqi capital, in an interview given to the newspaper “The National ” a militiaman declared: “we see homosexuality as a serious disease that is spreading rapidly among the young men in the community, after it has been brought here by American soldiers. These are not Iraqi habits or habits of our community, and we have to wipe them out”.

Over the last few months it is believed that dozens and dozens of gay homosexuals have been brutally murdered because of their homosexuality in an effort to eliminate those who are considered “morally deviant”.

However, this kind of crime has been taking place since 2003. Officially, the Iraqi police state that the number of murders over the last two months is less than ten, though unofficially they acknowledge that the figure is at least double that. Some of the victims were murdered by their own families or tribes, who see homosexuality as a serious stain on their own honour.

The Iraqi militiaman, in the same interview states: “we have the approval of the most important Iraqi tribes to get rid of the men who imitate women”, explaining that he was once in the Mahdi Army, but now acts independently of the militia of the disbanded leader of the Moqtada-al-Sadr movement: “Our aim is to contribute to the stabilization of society”.

Homosexuality is illegal in Iraqi and, after instructions posted in 2005 on the website of the Shiite religious leader Ali al Sistani, it is to be considered a crime punishable with the death sentence - and homosexuals are to be killed in the “worst” way possible. Though this page was later removed, the sentiments it expressed appear to be shared by other Iraqi religious leaders.

“The Islamic punishment for gay people is to be burnt to death or subjected to any other form of capital punishment”, said imam Hussein from the mosque in the Karada district of Baghdad. “Those who break God’s laws must be purified by the Muslim community. There are clear rules for humanity: men must be men and women must be women”. The religious leader states that the Iraqi government should intervene with determination against homosexuals, but if it fails to, it is more than acceptable for families and tribes to kill them. “The truth is that homosexuality is a source of shame for them. By killing homosexuals, they are doing God’s will”.

Taher Mustafa, a member of the medical staff in Baghdad, has recently stated that over the last three months he himself has seen three men he believe were killed because of their homosexuality. He also added: “three men, between the ages of 17 – 25, who were either killed or burnt to death”.

In September 2009, an article in the British Sunday magazine ‘The Observer’, revealed that the Iraqi Islamic extremists who hunt out homosexuals have started monitoring chat rooms and websites, and since the beginning of the year they have murdered more than 130 gay men. The journalist from The Observer met the leader of one of these fundamentalist organizations in Baghdad. A 22-year-old computer expert, he spends at least six hours every day hunting out homosexuals over the Internet: “It is the most simple way to find these people who are destroying Islam and who aim to soil a reputation we have taken years to build”.

After the international alarm sounded months ago by Iraqi LGBT and EveryOne Group (and after an attempt by the EveryOne activists Roberto Malini, Matteo Pegoraro, Dario Picciau and Glenys Robinson to seek a mediation with His Excellency Mazin Abdulwahab Thiab, the Iraqi Ambassador in Italy - as well as the institutions of the Multinational Coalition in Iraq), Human Rights Watch has also recently described the repression of homosexuals in Iraq as “an authentic ethnic cleansing programme, a systematic campaign against the gay community which is being subjected to torture and murder”.

EveryOne Group, which is in direct contact with the president of Iraqi LGBT, Ali Hilli, as well as with the young asylum-seeker, is appealing to the Dutch and French authorities, as well as the members of the European Parliament, Commission and Council (particularly the Committee Against Torture) to grant Anwar Basim Saleh refugee status and suitable protection as soon as possible. We ask that his rights be recognised according to the Geneva Convention, the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union and the international laws that defend a person’s right to life, health and personal freedom. We ask that Anwar be spared further psychological and physical stress, because just the news of a risk of him being deported back to Iraq could kill him.

We are requesting the intervention of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, asking the organization to be the spokesman for this case in order to guarantee the most correct and urgent procedure to ensure the boy is granted international protection and the risk of deportation is eliminated for good.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

[French translation by Everyone Group]

Rome, London et Rotterdam, 15 septembre 2009

Groupe EveryOne: nous démandons protection et asile pour le jeune activiste gay irakien Anwar Basim Saleh

Il faut que les autorités lui confèrent immédiatement le statut de réfugié

du Groupe EveryOne

Anwar Basim Saleh, 21enne activiste gay irakien qui vient de Baghdad, se trouve actuellement en Hollande, où il a demandé asile politique. Anwar, avant de fuir de son Pays, était le coordonnateur d'une organisation d'aide pour homosexuels, initiative de l'association Iraqi LGBT. Pour cette raison les autoritées gouvernementales (Badr Corps) l'ont arrêté au mois de février 2009. Le jeune a été frappé, torturé et a souffert une tres grave traumatisme pour les interminables jours de détention et pour les abus subis.

Il a été enquêté et répétéement interrogé pour son engagement comme activiste pour l'association'Iraqi LGBT et pour son activités humanitaires et de droits de l'homme. En Iraq Anwar prêtait secrètement aide et assistance aux homosexuels persécutés. Pendant la détention il a rencontré autres cinq membres de son organisation qui ont été condamnés à mort pour la même raison. En profitant de la visite en prison d'un des volontaires d'Iraqi LGBT, Anwar a délivré une lettre avec son appel désespéré: “Sauvez-moi de la peine de mort”. Iraqi LGBT a payé immédiatement aux autorités une caution de 5000 dollars pour obtenir le relâchement du jeune. Quand il a été libre, le 14 avril 2009, Anwar a embarqué à bord d'un avion de lign pour Paris, en fuyant le Pays qui l'aurait trés probablement condamné à mort.

Après quelque mois, passé sans aucune aide de la part des services sociaux ni des associations ou des autorités françaises, en mendiant au bord de la route et en vivant comme un clochard, sans connaître autre langue que l'arabe, Anwar a laissé la France le 22 juin 2009. Le jeune est allé en Hollande chercher protection humanitaire. Il est allé spontanéement chez la Police de Rotterdam, en résumant son histoire. Les autoritées l'ont adressé à l'Office locale pour les Réfugiés, qui l'ont accueilli dans le Centre pour l'asile de Terabil. Le 2 settembre 2009, Anwar a été convoqué au ministère de la Justice pour sa demande d'asile. Le fonctionnaire lui a communiqué que, sur la base de la Convention de Dublin, la France aurait dû décider si lui conférer le statut de réfugié. Anwar, qui est toujours en territoire hollandais, a prié les autorités de reconsidérer sa demande en Hollande, où il y a autres réfugiés homosexuels originaires des pays arabes, pour éviter des ultérieurs traumatiques déplacements et une longue attente de connaître son sort.

Les autoritées et le peuple de Baghdad considerent l'homosexualité comme une grave maladie ou un crime contre Dieu (http://www.thenational.ae/). Un soldat de Baghdad a declaré au quotidien local: “L'homosexualité est dangereuse pour les jeunes de la comunnauté islamique. Celles-ci ne sont pas des habitudes de notre Pays, mais viennent de l'Ocident et nous devons les éliminer”.

En Iraq, dans les derniers mois, on a tué dizaines et dizaines de gays. Mais la persecutions des gays a commencé en 2003. La police irakenne affirme qu'il y a eté au moins dix homicides de gays. Mais le nombre réel est plus gros et il y a été des personnes LGBT qui ont été massacrées par les mêmes membres de leur famille, qui considerait l'homosexualité comme une grave tache sur leur honneur. Le soldat a dit que “les principales tribus irakennes voudraient liquider les hommes qui imitent les femmes, parce que notre objectif est celui de contribuer à stabiliser la societé “.

L’homosexualité est illégal en Iraq et selon les idées du leader chiite Ale al Sistani, doit être considérée un délit à punir avec peine capital et les homosexuels doivent être tués sans aucune pitié. L'imam de la mosquée du quartier Karada de Baghdad, monsieur Hussein a demandé la torture et autres peines ou traitements cruels pour les gays en Irak, parce que “Ils violent les règles de Dieu et doivent être purifié”. Taher Mustafa, un medecin de Baghdad, a récemment affirmé d'avoir vu trois hommes brûlés à mor parce que gays.

Comme la campagne de meurtres ciblant les gays irakiens s’intensifie, une chaîne de télévision arabe a révélé l’utilisation une horrible nouvelle forme detorture mortelle contre les gays. Des escadrons de la mort anti-gays chiites scellent l’anus deshomosexuels avec une colle très puissante avant d’induire une diarrhée qui conduit à une mort lente et douloureuse. L’utilisation de cette torture terrifiante a été signalée pour la première fois par la chaîne de télévision Al Arabiya, dont le siège se trouve dans les Émirats Arabes Unis, qui a été averti par nombreux activistes pour les droits de l’homme.

Yanar Mohammed, présidente de l’OWFI, a déclaré à Al Arabiya que la substance utilisée pour cette torture “est une colle forte fabriquée en Iran et lorsque la peau est collée avec, elle ne peut être décollée que par une intervention chirurgicale. Après avoir collé l’anus deshomosexuels, ils leur donnent une boisson qui cause la diarrhée. Et comme l’anus est fermé, la diarrhée, cause la mort. Des vidéos de cette forme de torture circulent sur les téléphones mobiles en Irak”.

À Bagdad un journaliste de l'Observer a rencontré un jeune informatique qui travaille pour une organisation fondamentaliste. Chaque jour il passe au moins six heures sur Internet à chasse de homosexuels : “C'est le moyen plus simple pour trouver les homosexuels qui détruisent l’Islam”. Après la campagne internationale initiée au mois de mars 2009 par Iraqi LGBT et le Groupe EveryOne et après la tentative de médiation effectuée par les activistes du Groupe EveryOne Roberto Malini, Matteo Pegoraro, Dario Picciau et Glenys Robinson avec Ambassadeur irakien en Italie, Mazin Abdulwahab Thiab, recemment Human Rights Watch a défini la répression des gays en Iraq comme “une véritable purge ethnique, avec tortures et homicides”.

Le Groupe EveryOne, en contacte avec le président d'Iraqi LGBT Ali Hili et le jeune Anwar Basim Saleh, demande aux autorités et aux institutions françaises (Anwar se trouve en Hollande, mais peut etre que, pour la Convention de Dublin, ce sera la France a lui donner protection et asile) ainsi que aux membres du Parlement européen, de la Commission EU et du Conseil de l'Europe (en particulier du Comité contre la torture), de s'activer afin que soit garantie la protection et soit reconnu le statut de réfugié à Anwar Basim Saleh, comme prevue la Convention de Genêve et les accords internationaux qui défendent les Droits Humains. Nous sollicitons l'attention et l'intervention d'urgence du Haut Commissaire des Nations Unies pour les Réfugiés, Monsieur António Guterres, afin que le jeune reçoit la protection internationale et le statut de Refugé, en évitant chaque risque de déportation.

Nous demandons ainsi à tous les organismes et associations des droits de l'homme, y compris les responsables des organes du gouvernement français, du gouvernement hollandais et de l'Union européenne, ainsi qu'aux syndicats et associations de journalistes, de défendre le droit à la sécurité et à la vie de Muntather Al-Zaidi et de travailler pour assurer sa libération immédiate.

Gruppo EveryOne

Tel: (+ 39) 334-8429527 (+ 39) 331-3585406

www.everyonegroup.com :: info@everyonegroup.com

The Observer - How Islamist gangs use internet to track, torture and kill Iraqi gays

2009-09-14T16:26:00.003+01:00

Iraqi militias infiltrate internet gay chatrooms to hunt their quarry – and hundreds are feared to be victims.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/13/iraq-gays-murdered-militias

Sitting on the floor, wearing traditional Islamic clothes and holding an old notebook, Abu Hamizi, 22, spends at least six hours a day searching internet chatrooms linked to gay websites. He is not looking for new friends, but for victims.

"It is the easiest way to find those people who are destroying Islam and who want to dirty the reputation we took centuries to build up," he said. When he finds them, Hamizi arranges for them to be attacked and sometimes killed.

Hamizi, a computer science graduate, is at the cutting edge of a new wave of violence against gay men in Iraq. Made up of hardline extremists, Hamizi's group and others like it are believed to be responsible for the deaths of more than 130 gay Iraqi men since the beginning of the year alone.
The deputy leader of the group, which is based in Baghdad, explained its campaign using a stream of homophobic invective. "Animals deserve more pity than the dirty people who practise such sexual depraved acts," he told the Observer. "We make sure they know why they are being held and give them the chance to ask God's forgiveness before they are killed."
The violence against Iraqi gays is a key test of the government's ability to protect vulnerable minority groups after the Americans have gone.

Dr Toby Dodge, of London University's Queen Mary College, believes that the violence may be a consequence of the success of the government of Nouri al-Maliki. "Militia groups whose raison d'être was security in their communities are seeing that function now fulfilled by the police. So their focus has shifted to the moral and cultural sphere, reverting to classic Islamist tactics of policing moral boundaries," Dodge said.

Homosexuality was not criminalised under Saddam Hussein – indeed Iraq in the 1960s and 1970s was known for its relatively liberated gay scene. Violence against gays started in the aftermath of the invasion in 2003. Since 2004, according to Ali Hali, chairman of the Iraqi LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) group, a London-based human-rights group, a total of 680 have died in Iraq, with at least 70 of those in the past five months. The group believes the figures may be higher, as most cases involving married men are not reported. Seven victims were women. According to Hali, Iraq has become "the worst place for homosexuals on Earth".
The killings are brutal, with victims ritually tortured. Azhar al-Saeed's son was one. "He didn't follow what Islamic doctrine tells but he was a good son," she said. "Three days after his kidnapping, I found a note on my door with blood spread over it and a message saying it was my son's purified blood and telling me where to find his body."

She went with police to find her son's remains. "We found his body with signs of torture, his anus filled with glue and without his genitals," she said. "I will carry this image with me until my dying day."

Police officers interviewed by the Observer said the killings were not aimed at gays but were isolated remnants of the sectarian violence that racked the country between 2005 and 2006. Hamizi's group, however, boasts that two people a day are chosen to be "investigated" in Baghdad. The group claims that local tribes are involved in homophobic attacks, choosing members to hunt down the victims. In some areas, a list of names is posted at restaurants and food shops.

The roommate of Haydar, 26, was kidnapped and killed three months ago in Baghdad. After Haydar contacted the last person his friend had been chatting with on the net, he found a letter on his front door alerting him "about the dangers of behaving against Islamic rules". Haydar plans to flee to Amman, the Jordanian capital. "I have… to run away before I suffer the same fate," he said.

According to Human Rights Watch, the Shia militia known as the Mahdi army may be among the militants implicated in the violence, particularly in the northern part of Baghdad known as Sadr City. There are reports that Mahdi army militias are harassing young men simply for wearing "western fashions".

A Ministry of Interior spokesperson, Abdul-Karim Khalaf, denied allegations of police collaboration. "The Iraqi police exists to protect all Iraqis, whatever their sexual persuasion," he said.

Hashim, another victim of violence by extremists, was attacked on Abu Nawas Street. Famous for its restaurants and bars, the street has become a symbol of the relative progress made in Baghdad. But it was where Hashim was set on by four men, had a finger cut off and was badly beaten. His assailants left a note warning that he had one month to marry and have "a traditional life" or die.

"Since that day I have not left my home. I'm too scared and don't have money to run away," Hashim said.

Iraqi LGBT welcome Human Rights Watch report on pogrom, urges practical aid

2009-08-18T13:53:00.001+01:00

PRESS RELEASE

For immediate use

Iraqi LGBT welcome Human Rights Watch report on pogrom, urges practical aid

The Iraqi LGBT group today welcomed the release by Human Rights Watch of its report 'They want us exterminated' which documents the killing of LGBT people in Iraq, in particular the extensive media coverage it has generated. Much of the information in the report is sourced from Iraqi LGBT members.

"This report underlines what we have been saying since our group's formation in 2006," said Iraqi LGBT spokesperson, Ali Hili. "We have information on over 700 killings including honour killings."

However Hili says that the group, which has 100 members inside Iraq (as well as refugees in neighboring countries) and supports LGBT people through safe houses, offers practical support (food etc.), psychological and educational support, is chronically underfunded.

"We are the only people offering support to our fellow Iraqi LGBT inside Iraq but because we do not have the funds we have had to turn people away," he said.

The group recently published its annual report, available on its website, which showed how the money it receives is spent.

The report explains how it has developed methods of operating clandestinely which are essential for such an operation in the Middle East. Hili is the only visible member of the group and as a result has attracted death threats in his exile in London. He is under police protection.

Recently it received a second substantial donation from a Dutch group. However due to low funding it has had to close safe houses and slow its development plans.

At the same time it has seen very large amounts of money raised in the United States go to a Lebanese group which is supposed to be supporting Iraqi LGBT refugees. Ali says that the refugees, delivered to Lebanon by Human Rights Watch, have in fact been abandoned and some have returned to Iraq because they had no practical support.

"We have been trying to support one refugee who returned to Iraq from Lebanon because his medical needs were not being supported and who is now in danger. Through the United Nations, he has actually been accepted as a refugee by Sweden however it costs $2000 just for him to get back to Lebanon and then there are his travel costs to Sweden on top of that plus organising support in Sweden."

"This is an example of a case where we have great difficulty helping. It also shows something of the real costs involved in actually supporting people. Another example of that would be the bribes we have had to pay to save peoples lives."

"Our group represents Iraqi LGBT - they are our members - and, despite immense difficulties, our group has gained a lot of experience since we were established. Please support us if you want to help save LGBT people in Iraq."

Donations to Iraqi LGBT can be made to the PayPal Account iraqilgbt@yahoo.co.uk .

Or make cheques payable to (IRAQI LGBT) and send them to:

Iraqi LGBT
22 Notting Hill Gate
Unit 111London,
W11 3JE
United Kingdom

For further information please call ++44 (0) 79-819 59453 or email iraqilgbt@googlemail.com or see http://iraqilgbtuk.blogspot.com

Ali said that the group also welcomed those who could donate their skills.

ENDS

ATTACHMENT

The Safe Houses Project

IRAQ: Emergency Shelter, Human Services and Protection for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender People:

IRAQI LGBT started to establish a network of safe houses inside Iraq in March 2006.

As of today, we have only two safe houses open and running funded by HIVOS a Dutch based human rights organization.

The members of our group inside Iraq urgently need funds to open at least four safe houses. These funds will allow us to keep the four safe houses open and running, and provide safety, shelter, food and many other needs for our LGBT friends inside Iraq. Any funds we receive that go beyond what we need for these four safe houses could be used to open more safe houses in the near future. We desperately need to add more because we have so many urgent cases in other cities. We receive requests for shelter every day, but we are not able to help yet.

Every safe house has around 200 square meters of living space, but harbors 10 to 12 people, so is very overcrowded. The residents are struggling badly because of the shortages of almost all the basic necessities in Iraq.

Rent: We have paid three months rent in advance. The most recent payments were in August. The average rent per safe house per month is $ 600 US Dollar.

Security: We paid the salaries of two guards per house, at $ 200 US Dollar per guard per month.

Other expenses of each house: We have paid $ 600 a month for each house approximately for natural gas and kerosene for cooking, and for food, fuel for generators which provide the electricity supply.

Urgent priority needs: Our priorities at this stage are: natural gas or kerosene for cooking and heating; fuel for generating electricity; food; mobile phones and calling cards; money for transportation to allow residents some freedom of movement; beds, mattresses, blankets, sheets and pillows; cameras; printers; two computers; house supplies, such as cooking pans, dishes, and flatware; some furniture; clean water for drinking and bathing; soap for washing and bathing, tooth paste, razors and of course housing, guards etc.

Amount needed and how it would be spent (per month):

Natural gas or kerosene for cooking and heating - 50 GBP
Fuel for generating electricity – $ 300
Food - $ 600
Mobile phones, calling cards, and internet café charges - $ 450 etc.
Transportation – $ 250
Beds, mattresses, blankets, sheets and pillows – $ 1,300 – onetime payment
Cameras – $ 100 – onetime payment
Printers – $ 100 - onetime payment
Two computers – $ 1,200 - onetime payment
Kitchen supplies, such as cooking pans, dishes, and flatware – $ 400 – onetime payment
Some furniture – $ 500– onetime payment
Clean water for drinking and bathing; $ 250
Toiletries (soap for washing and bathing, tooth paste, razors etc.) – $ 150

We also need to pay for medicines for the members of our group, doctors will come and have a home visit monthly for all members their cost is $ 400 US Dollar each month.

Ali Hili - Iraqi Lgbt - Chair
22 Notting Hill Gate
Unit # 111
London , W11 3JE
United Kingdom
Mob: ++44 798 1959 453
Website : http://iraqilgbtuk.blogspot.com/

Iraqi LGBT Annual Report and Accounts

2009-08-18T12:13:00.000+01:00

Iraqi LGBT Annual Accounts

Iraqi LGBT Annual Report

Coverage of HRW report

2009-08-18T01:43:00.008+01:00

BBC World Service 'Newshour' (audio). Includes interview with Iraqi LGBT's Ali Hili
BBC Radio Four 'Today' (audio): Gay killings 'normal' in Iraq
CBC (Canada) interviews Tom Porteous, London director of Human Rights Watch: QuickTime Real Media

Huffington Post: Iraqi Gays Targeted, Brutally Killed: Human Rights Watch
New York Times: Human Rights Watch: Iraqi Gays Tortured and Killed
CNN: Gay Men Atacked, Executed in Iraq, Rights Group Says
As-Safir The death of hundreds in the context of the campaign« Alnaamin »and narrow Alkinsat (Google translation)

CNN

Democracy Now!

BBC

Unsafe Haven Final

London Group Spent £60,000 Last Year to Aid Gay and Transgender Iraqis

2009-08-16T19:02:00.003+01:00

£24,000 donated by public, Iraqi LGBT accounts to 31 May shows

Iraqi LGBT, the London-based group that support gay, lesbian and transgender Iraqis, received just over £60,000 in donations in the year to May 2009, the accounts published this morning show.

And in the same period, all but £15 was sent to the Middle East to provide ‘safe houses’ in Iraq and Syria. Currently, the group runs two ‘safe houses’ in Syria and one in Iraq.

Of the donations received, £35,550 came a grants from two organisations, the Heartland Alliance (HA) in Chicago (£11,236) and Hivos (£24,313), a human rights group in the Netherlands that is mainly financed by the Dutch government.

The remaining £24,773 in donations came from individuals.

The costs incurred in the UK of running group was 9 per cent of the total expenditure (almost £5,450, which included £1,340 for special accounting for Hivos).

Largest expenditure was almost £1,400 which was spent on costs of the group’s weekly meetings during the financial year. In a bid to save cash, this has now been reduced to a meeting every two weeks, with a current proposal for the 19-strong group to meet monthly, the report says.

The report highlights the considerable difficulties in transferring cash to Iraq and Syria from the Iraqi LGBT bank account in London.

“We have realised that we sometimes need to trust our local people at face value and when we transfer funds to them, we have to believe that they will distribute these funds to the refugees who rely on this,” the report says.

“We have subsequently found out through making certain checks that our local administrator in Syria has not always passed on the funds. This is the same person who has been deported back to Iraq and for whom we put in a significant effort to keep him out the hands of the Iraqi Interior Ministry. As a result of this episode we have decided to pay each refugee in Syria individually to circumvent this problem. We have had no other problems, neither in Iraq , nor Turkey nor Jordan .”

While there was just £15 surplus at the end of the financial year, Iraqi LGBT is to get an increased contribution from Hivos – this year the Dutch organisation has allocated 50,000 Euros, the report says.

During the last financial year, the group realised that in order for their activities to survive, the organisational part has to remain secretive.

“Given the risks and dangers to which our local members are exposed, we must inform them on a need to know basis,” the report says . “We are aware that this has caused confusion but if these local activists know how our whole operation works then they could disclose this to the Iraqi authorities under interrogation.

“We have learned that there is a lot more to just providing shelter for refugees. There is not just the physical but also the psychological aspects which impact the refugees. It has been just as much a learning curve for us as it is for them.”

Iraqi LGBT is currently in the process of registering as a charity. A previous attempt to get charitable status failed, the report reveals.“When we have previously applied, we were told that our current constitution does not allow us to be registered as a charity as it contained clauses which have a political motive,” the report says.

The report also points out that they are working to register gay Iraqi refugees with The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

USA TODAY - Militias target some Iraqis for being gay

2009-07-29T11:04:00.002+01:00

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2009-07-28-gays-in-iraq_N.htm

By Paul Wiseman and Nadeem Majeed, USA TODAY

BAGHDAD — The young man turns to the camera and pleads with his tormentors.
"I'm not a terrorist," he tells the Iraqi police who surround him. "I want you to know I am different. But I am not a terrorist."

To some fundamentalist Iraqi Muslims, Ahmed Sadoun Saleh was worse than a terrorist.
He was gay. He wore his hair long and took female hormones to grow breasts. Amused by his appearance, Iraqi police officers stopped him in December at a checkpoint in a southern Baghdad neighborhood dominated by radical Shiite militias. They groped Saleh and ridiculed him.

The assault was captured on video and circulated on cellphones throughout Baghdad, says Ali Hili, founder of London-based Iraqi LGBT, a group dedicated to protecting Iraq's gays and lesbians. Shortly after the video was made public, Hili says Saleh contacted him, fearing for his life, and asked for his help to flee Iraq.

"Unfortunately, it was too late," Hili says. Saleh turned up dead two months later, he says.
At least 82 gay men have been killed in Iraq since December, according to Iraqi LGBT. The violence has raised questions about the Iraqi government's ability to protect a diverse range of vulnerable minority groups that also includes Christians and Kurds, especially following the

withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraqi cities last month.

Mithal al-Alusi, a secular, liberal Sunni legislator, is among those who blame the killings on armed militant groups such as al-Qaeda and the Mahdi Army militia.

By targeting one of the most vulnerable groups in a conservative Muslim society — people whose sexual orientation is banned by Iraqi law — the militias essentially are serving notice that they remain powerful despite the U.S. and Iraqi militaries' efforts to curtail them, al-Alusi says.
The militants "want to educate the society to accept killers on the street," al-Alusi says in an interview. "Why did Hitler start with gays? They are weak. They have no political cover. They have no legal cover."

The attacks have terrified a gay community that, for a brief time after the U.S. troop surge in 2007-08, tentatively enjoyed greater freedom and security.

"I am worried about my life," says a middle-age gay man in Baghdad who asked to be identified by the pseudonym Hassan. He declined to be identified by his real name because the recent violence has made him fear for his life. "I don't know what to do," he says.

Hili and other gay rights activists believe the killers operate with the complicity and sometimes the direct involvement of Iraqi security forces.

As part of a drive to stop the sectarian violence that peaked in Iraq in 2006-07, those forces have taken into their ranks numerous former militia members from the Mahdi Army (loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr) and the pro-Iranian Badr Brigade.

"The Ministry of Interior in Iraq is behind this campaign of terror," Hili says in an e-mail.He says witnesses have told him that police harass and beat suspected gays at checkpoints and sometimes turn them over to militias for execution.

Interior Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Abdul Karim Khalaf disputes such allegations. He says the ministry has assigned a special bureau to investigate the killings of gays; he says he knows of six gays who had been executed as of May.

Homosexuality, Khalaf says, is against the law and "is rejected by the customs of our society." He adds, however, that offenders should be handled by the courts, not dispatched by vigilante groups.

The killers aren't just executing their gay victims. They are "mutilating their bodies and torturing them," says fundamentalist Sunni cleric Sheik Mohammed al-Ghreri, who has criticized the violence.

Hili says the militias have come up with a particularly cruel way to inflict pain: sealing victims' anuses with glue, then force-feeding them laxatives. Hili says he has spoken to several victims who survived the ordeal.

'You can just be crushed'

Besides targeting gays, Sadr City militias also are harassing and sometimes killing straight young men who violate fundamentalist fashion and decorum by wearing low-riding pants and other Western-style clothing, slicking back their hair or making it spiky, hanging out in cafes or pool halls or flirting with girls, says human rights activist Mohammed Jasim, 28.

"The campaign is against gays and anybody who looks gay" in the eyes of militiamen indoctrinated to believe immodest dress is an affront to God, Jasim says.

"Young people felt their city had been liberated," says Jasim's friend Wisam Mizban, 32.
"They thought they could wear what they wanted. The militias felt threatened and started killing them. They are doing their crimes under the cover of the government. … Most young people want a civilized life. The militias and the government are putting pressure on them again."

The campaign has had a chilling effect on Baghdad's nightlife.

Entrepreneur Ali al-Ali opened the Shisha coffee shop in an upstairs storefront overlooking a bustling street in the upscale Karrada neighborhood. The place quickly became a hangout for young gay men, who'd sit and talk and drink lattes, and smoke flavored tobacco from the water pipes that gave the cafe its name.

But as the militias started killing gay men, Ali discouraged gays from congregating at his cafe. "If (militias) see gays coming here, maybe they will target me outside Karrada," al-Ali says.
His sentiments were echoed by Hussam Abdullah, whose tea shop also used to be a hangout for gay men — until militias warned Abdullah there would be trouble if he didn't send them away. So he did.

The militias usually send out warnings before they attack. Posters go up in Sadr City listing the offenders — gay and flashy straight men — by name and neighborhood. "If you don't give up what you are doing," said a recent one seen by a USA TODAY reporter, "death will be your fate. And this warning will come true, and the punishment will be worse and worse."

The poster referred to the offenders as "puppies," the fundamentalist epithet for gays here. "In Arabic culture, if you want to insult someone you call them a dog," human rights activist Yanar Mohammed says. "If you're a small dog, you can just be crushed."

Among those listed was a young man named Allawi Hawar, a local soccer star who incurred the wrath of the militias by wearing his hair long and partying with his friends in Sadr City cafes.
Hawar was playing pool one day last month when two masked men drove up on a motor scooter. One climbed off and made his way inside the cafe, clutching a pistol.

"We have something to deal with," he announced to startled patrons, according to witness Emad Saad, 25.

The gunman grabbed Hawar and dragged him outside. Then he shot the young athlete in the leg. After Hawar crumpled to the ground, bleeding, the gunman shot him again and killed him, Saad says.

The militiamen pick their targets by entering cafes and looking for men who appear feminine or too showy, Saad says. Then they ask around to get the offenders' names, and later put them on the death lists distributed around town.

Saad himself likes to wear Western jeans and slicked-back hair. He has taken to carrying a Glock pistol, awaiting his showdown with the militias.

"Some people are afraid, but I am not," he says. "I have done nothing wrong."
The Sadr City warning posters do not appear to be the work of educated theologians. A recent one was filled with Arabic misspellings, including a faulty rendering of "compassionate" — part of one of the 99 names for God.

But Ali Hili, the London activist, and others believe high-level clerics have ordered the killings. Iraq's Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani several years ago decreed that the punishment for homosexuality is death "if it is proven before the religious judge."

An Iraqi TV channel, Alsumaria, reported that Sunni cleric al-Ghreri has called for the execution of gays. Al-Ghreri denies issuing such a statement, but concedes that some "stubborn" clerics might support the death penalty for gays.

He says homosexuality is "abnormal" and that gays should know that "freedom has limits." First, he says, gays should be warned to change their offensive behavior.
If that fails, he says, they should be jailed. If detentions don't work, they should endure 100 lashes for engaging in gay sex. And if four separate lashings fail and if witnesses testify against the suspects, he says, then they should be executed.

Exactly what unleashed the recent wave of violence is unclear.

Some — including Hassan, the middle-age gay man — trace the terror to a birthday party around New Year's at a cafe on Palestine Street in eastern Baghdad.

The party attracted about 20 gay men who cut loose on the dance floor, celebrating what they thought was their freedom in a more peaceful, stable Iraq. A video of the revelry was entitled Gay Scandal and distributed around the city.

"This was the start of it," Hassan says. "It made the ministry people crazy."
In London, activist Hili calls the party "a foolish action from members of our community who let their guard down."

However, he doesn't believe the party "was the spark that ignited all the flames."
Hili says the violence started earlier, with clerical fatwas against gays and police raids in December in Najaf, Karbala and Kut.

The search for safety

Unable to trust the authorities — and in some cases shunned by their own families — many Iraqi gays have gone into hiding. Hassan and some gay friends say they had found refuge in a house in Karrada. But as the threat against them increased, they became afraid the police would find them. So they scattered.

Hassan says he sometimes stays at home with his brothers — their parents are dead — but he's afraid even of them, afraid they will kill him because he has brought shame to the family.
He says he wanted to move in with his sister, who lives in Abu Dhabi. She turned him away, saying she didn't want her children to know they have a gay uncle.
Unwilling to trust the police, Iraqi LGBT has set up its own safe houses for gays in Iraq. The group has struggled to raise money and had to close three safe houses in the past couple of months, leaving just one open.

Hili says five safe houses are needed, each of them housing 10 to 12 gay refugees. Rent for a 2,150-square-foot safe house is usually $600 a month. Yet other expenses pile up: security guards, food, fuel, medical bills, pots and pans, bedding.

"We desperately need to add more because we have so many urgent cases," Hili says. "We receive requests for shelter every day, but are not able to help."

Things were better for gays, Hassan says, under the dictatorial rule of Saddam Hussein.
"In the Saddam era, it wasn't like this," he says. Saddam's security forces, offended by Hassan's openly gay lifestyle, once arrested him and hauled him to court. The judge let him go, ruling that he had done nothing wrong.

"Now, you don't know who to be afraid of," he says. "Forget about freedom or democracy. We just want our safety."

Gay Life After Saddam

2009-07-13T19:42:00.003+01:00

Guardian review

What terrific reporting from Aasmah Mir in Gay Life After Saddam (BBC Radio 5 Live). It looked at the grim reality for gay, lesbian and transgender people living in Iraq, and the reasons for this savage new persecution. In a "liberated" country, this group finds itself yearning for the former regime. "We used to go every Thursday by the Tigris," said one man, his voice suffused with longing, "and we'd drink and swim. It was very relaxing."

Nobody in the programme sounded relaxed: Mir spoke to those in exile, in hiding, people who had been tortured or issued with death threats for helping others escape. Their stories ranged from sad to gruesome. We heard one Iraqi man tell how his boyfriend was abducted and murdered. "They had thrown his corpse in the garbage," he explained. "His genitals were cut off and a piece of his throat had been cut out." We heard, too, about the torture: rape, and also "glue in the anus and then force-feeding laxatives".

Some of those fleeing Iraq seek asylum in Britain and there were tales of seemingly harsh treatment by the authorities. Mir couldn't explore these, as both David Miliband and Phil Woolas refused interviews for this programme. Shame on them, you were left thinking.

Listen to the show (60')

Gay Life After Saddam

paul canning's Podcast

Iraqi LGBT to apply for charitable status, provides interim accounts

2009-07-13T19:27:00.006+01:00

Media release

For immediate use

Iraqi LGBT to apply for charitable status, provides interim accounts

10 July 2009

The Iraqi LGBT organisation has today provided interim accounts for its Syria operations (see below) and announced that it will resubmit an application for charitable status.

Based in the UK, the group works to aid lesbians, gays, bisexual and transgender people within Iraq as well as many who have fled for exile in nearby countries. It runs a 'safe house' in Baghdad, Iraq, where 20 LGBT people are currently housed and where previously 70 people have stayed for various periods.

The safe house will be featured in a documentary on BBC Radio this Sunday. It includes interviews with the person who runs it as well as some of those who live there.

Since it was founded Iraqi LGBT has provided safety for over 100 people, including supporting 70 people financially. It has provided support for 23 people outside Iraq including shelter, medication and food.

The reapplication for charitable status follows a change in the group's aims which removed working the requirement to work for change in Iraqi law, which resulted in a previous rejection by the UK's Charity Commission as this was regarded as 'political'. It also follows the work of the group's volunteer accountant on preparing accounts to meet charity commissioners’ standards. In addition the group has become a Company limited by guarantee (No. 06954355).

Iraqi LGBT’s accountant Josh Botham ATT ACPA ACCA IIT[dip] explained that - like others such as Amnesty International - the group has had to use circuitous routes in order to get funds to exiles, as well as pay bribes in order to secure release of people under real threat of death.

Botham said that as part of the application the group would publish full accounts on its website shortly.

Funding for the group in the past has come from the group's own members and donations including one in 2008 from the US Representative Jared Polis. He donated $10,000 (£6,853) via the Heartland Alliance to aid the project in Syria.

Polis' funding went to the Chicago based LGBT group Heartland Alliance to provide for five people to be moved from Iraq to Syria and to provide housing rent, food and other basic needs in Syria. This project ran between 1 June and 31 December 2008. Included in the cost was the living accommodation for the local administrator of the group.

Botham said that: "Providing the financial support involved a difficult money transfer process in order to avoid coming to the attention of Syrian authorities. Such an operation also meant that in order to safeguard the lives of these refugees, people were only informed on a need to know basis."

"Heartland Alliance [as grant provider] however insisted that our group should meet up with the Lebanese LGBT group, Helem, in November 2008, at that same time that some prominent members of Heartland Alliance visited Syria."

"The result was disastrous for our group, Iraqi LGBT. Some of our members were arrested by Syrian police in Damascas in (which city). With the help of a local lawyer, Iraqi LGBT managed to get these people released. However one of them was later to be deported back to Iraq."

Iraqi LGBT has experienced other difficulties in coordinating activities with Heartland Alliance. Another grant of $10,000 meant for Iraqi LGBT came to the group from the Elisabeth Morse Genius Charitable Trust, based in Chicago. Botham gave them a budget of how to allocate this money.

However communications broke down with the Heartland Alliance's representative when it was claimed that the last transfer of $4,000 had never been received by our sources in Iraq. Says Botham: “This underlines the perils of where we are working and who we are working with."

"Iraqi LGBT has supported another nine Iraqi refugees in Syria, as well as a safe house in Iraq and has had to spend money on freeing people from custody. Obviously in such situations one doesn't get a receipt."

"Between 1 June 2008 to 31 May 2009, the Polis supported project represented one sixth of the group's expenditure. Just under a quarter of the group's funding actually came from the group's founder, Ali Hili, his family and his partner."

Iraqi LGBT Chair Ali Hilli added: "We are confident that the charitable status will be accepted and will be a great help for the group. As we have been reporting for several years now, our people in Iraq are being killed and we desperately need more financial support to save them and where necessary move them out of Iraq."

"This work is dangerous and threatening. Even in London I am under real threat and have been forced to move as a result."

Donations for Iraqi LGBT can be made via PayPal. See the group's website at http://iraqilgbtuk.blogspot.com for details.

ATTACHMENT

Syria underground Railroad Project

Covering the period from 1 June 2008 to 31 May 2009

Figures in US dollars

Total funding received from Heartland Alliance $15,520
Expenditure
Telephone cards and other means of communication $413
Basic food and supplies $486
Travel costs including passports and visa’s (for 5 people, from Bagdad to Damascus by road) $3,000
Legal fees (to prevent an individual from being imprisoned in Iraq) $4,000
Rent (Damascus) $7,000
Transportation costs (inside Syria to move nine Iraqi LGBT refugees when necessary
to another safe house) $413
Other costs $208
Total $15,218
Balance left $2

Iraqi LGBT expenditure in Syria

In addition to the funding received from Heartland Alliance, Iraqi LGBT from its own resources has supported another nine Iraqi LGBT refugees who had already made there own way to Syria.

The Heartland Alliance would not allow us to include the cost of transferring the money as part of their donation. We paid for it ourselves and we have therefore listed this bank fee under our own expenditure

Figures in pounds sterling

Covering the period from 1 June 2008 – 31 May 2009

Rent, food and other amenities like electricity (For two safe houses including any bribes paid.) £8,731
Communication (mobile phones, phone cards, internet etc) £95
Bank charges £415
Total £9,241

ENDS

Iraqi gays condemn Obama/Clinton inaction on pogrom

2009-06-03T19:58:00.004+01:00

Embassy statement 'offensive and insulting'

Iraqi lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people (LGBT) has spoken of their deep anger and offence at a statement by the Baghdad US Embassy concerning the violence and murder campaign against gays.

In a response to US Rep. Jared Polis, following a meeting with Iraqi government officials, chargé d’affaires Patricia Butenis said "We have no evidence that [the Iraq government's] security forces are in any way involved with these militias.

"Iraqi LGBT has been reporting for four years on police involvement with the terror campaign.

Group members speaking from Iraq said that they are "fed up with such 'political' words" and that the Americans are doing nothing to stop the terror campaign against them. They believe that the priority for Hillary Clinton's State Department and Obama's administration is to not upset the Iraqi government as they have no other allies within the country.

They believe that no-one is trying to help them and feel that the current timid diplomacy "will not do much good".

"These words from the American embassy officials are insulting to us, and to those many friends of ours who have murdered. This statement is evidence that the Iraqi government is doing nothing to protect its citizens.

''They are responsible for these crimes through bringing no one to justice, refusing to acknowledge their police's involvement and providing no rights for Iraqi LGBT in law."

"People should not forget that what's happening in Iraq right now is a direct result of the unlawful US invasion.

"Scott Long, director of Human Rights Watch’s LGBT Rights Program, has also criticism the State Department. In an interview with EdgeBoston, responding to State spokesperson John T. Fleming's pointed statement that 'homosexuality is not a crime in Iraq', Long responded that the fact that homosexuality is not a crime punishable by death "would be an interesting fact if the law, or the rule of law, mattered in Iraq.

"Long has just returned from a fact-finding mission to Iraq where he spoke to 25 survivors from Baghdad and other cities, including Najaf, Basra and Samarra.

As a consequence of what they found, Human Rights Watch has been organizing ways for as many LGBT Iraqis as possible to get out of the country.

Colorado U.S. Rep. Jared Polis, who has spoken about Iraqi government involvement with the violence, has written with Reps. Tammy Baldwin and Barney Frank to U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Christopher Hill.

"As LGBT Americans and cochairs of the Congressional LGBT Equality Caucus, we are disturbed and shocked at allegations that Ministry of the Interior Security Forces may be involved in the mass persecution and execution of LGBT Iraqis ... The persecution of Iraqis based on sexual orientation or gender identity is escalating and is unacceptable regardless of whether these policies are extrajudicial or state-sanctioned.

"The letter called on the U.S. embassy in Iraq to "prioritize the investigation" of the allegations and work with the Iraqi government to end the executions of LGBT Iraqis. Polis is drafting another letter that would be signed by more members of Congress and sent to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

2009-04-08T11:11:00.000+01:00

Iraq’s Newly Open Gays Face Scorn and Murder

BAGHDAD — The relative freedom of a newly democratic Iraq and the recent improvement in security have allowed a gay subculture to flourish here. The response has been swift and deadly.

In the past two months, the bodies of as many as 25 boys and men suspected of being gay have turned up in the huge Shiite enclave of Sadr City, the police and friends of the dead say. Most have been shot, some multiple times. Several have been found with the word “pervert” in Arabic on notes attached to their bodies, the police said.

“Three of my closest friends have been killed during the past two weeks alone,” said Basim, 23, a hairdresser. “They had been planning to go to a cafe away from Sadr City because we don’t feel safe here, but they killed them on the way. I had planned to go with them, but fortunately I didn’t.”
Basim, who preferred to be called “Basima” — the feminine version of his name — wears his hair long for Iraq. It falls to just below the ear. His ears are pierced, uncommon for Iraqi males. White makeup covers his face, a popular look for gay men in Sadr City who say they prefer light skin.
Though risky, his look is one result of the overall calm here that has allowed Iraqis to enjoy freedoms unthinkable two years ago: A growing number of women walk the streets unveiled, a few even daring to wear dresses above the knee. Families gather in parks for cookouts, and more people have begun to venture out at night.

But that has not changed the reality that Iraq remains religious, conservative — and still violent. The killers, the police say, are not just Shiite death squads, but also tribal and family members shamed by their gay relatives. (And the recent spate of violence has seemed aimed at more openly gay men, rather than homosexuality generally.)

Clerics in Sadr City have urged followers to help root out homosexuality in Iraqi society, and the police have begun their own crackdown on gay men.
“Homosexuality is against the law,” said Lt. Muthana Shaad, at a police station in the Karada district, a neighborhood that has become popular with gay men. “And it’s disgusting.”

For the past four months, he said, officers have been engaged in a “campaign to clean up the streets and get the beggars and homosexuals off them.”

Gay men, he said, can be arrested only if they are seen engaging in sex, but the police try to drive them away. “These people, we make sure they can’t get together in a coffee shop or walk together in the street — we make them break up,” he said.

Gay men and lesbians in Iraq have long been among the targets of both Shiite and Sunni death squads, but their murders have been overshadowed by the hundreds of overall weekly casualties during the height of sectarian violence in 2006 and 2007.

In 2005, the country’s most influential Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, issued a religious decree that said gay men and lesbians should be “punished, in fact, killed.” He added, “The people should be killed in the worst, most severe way of killing.” The language has since been removed from his Web site.

In recent months, groups of gay men have been taking greater chances, gathering in cafes and other public places in Baghdad, Basra, Najaf and other cities. On a recent night in Sadr City, several, their hair parted down the middle, talked as they quietly sipped tea at a garishly lighted cafe, oblivious to the stares of passers-by.

Basim, who would not give his last name out of fear for his safety, said he knew at least 20 young men from Sadr City’s large but hidden gay community who had disappeared during the past two months. He said he had learned later that each was found dead. After three of his friends were killed, he stayed inside his house for a week. Recently he has begun to go out again.

“I can’t stay at home all day,” he said. “I need to see my friends.”
Publicly, the Iraqi police have acknowledged only the deaths of six gay men in the neighborhood. But privately, police officials say the figure is far higher.

The chief of a Sadr City police station, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not allowed to speak to reporters, said family members had probably committed most of the Sadr City killings. He played down the role of death squads that had once been associated with the Mahdi Army, the militia that controlled Sadr City until American and Iraqi forces dislodged them last spring.

“Our investigation has found that these incidents are being committed by relatives of the gays — not just because of the militias,” he said. “They are killing them because it is a shame on the family.”

He said families typically refused to cooperate with the investigation or even to claim the bodies. No arrests have been made in the killings.
At the same time, though, clerics associated with Moktada al-Sadr, an anti-American cleric with significant influence in Sadr City, have devoted a portion of Friday Prayer services to inveighing against homosexuality.

“The community should be purified from such delinquent behavior like stealing, lying and the effeminacy phenomenon among men,” Sheik Jassem al-Mutairi said during his sermon last Friday. Homosexuality, he said, was “far from manhood and honesty.”

Abu Muhaned al-Diraji, a Sadrist official in Sadr City, said the clerics were in no way encouraging people to kill gay men.

“All we are doing is giving advice to people to take care of their sons,” Mr. Diraji said. He acknowledged, however, that some of the killing had been committed by members of “special groups,” or death squads.

“In general, it is the families that are killing the gay son, but I know that there are gunmen involved in this, too,” he said. “But we disavow anybody committing this kind of crime and we encourage the people to follow the law.”

In addition to the killings, a Sadr City cafe frequented by gay men recently burned down under mysterious circumstances.

Some young gay men in Sadr City have become nihilistic about the ever present threat.

“I don’t care about the militias anymore, because they’re going to kill me anyway — today, tomorrow or the day after,” said a man named Sa’ad, who has been taking estrogen and has developed small breasts. “I hate my community and my relatives. If they had their way, the result would be one gunshot.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/08/world/middleeast/08gay.html?hp

Friends can send Donations to IRAQI LGBT: The immediate urgent priority is to Support and Donate Money to LGBT activists in Iraq in order to assist their efforts to help other Lesbians, Gay, Bisexuals and Trans gender Iraqi's facing death, persecution and systematic Targeting by the Iraqi Police and Badr and Sadr Militia and to raise awareness about the wave of homophobic murders in Iraq to the outside world. Funds raised will also help provide LGBTs under threat of killing with refuge in the safer parts of Iraq (including safe houses, food, electricity, medical help) and assist efforts help them seek refuge in neighbouring countries.

Donate to our PayPal Account : iraqilgbt@yahoo.co.uk .Or make cheque payable to (IRAQI LGBT) send it to our address:Iraqi Lgbt22 Notting Hill GateUnit 111London,W11 3JEUnited Kingdom

URGENT - Iraq: Letter From a Member of Iraqi LGBT who Pleads for Help “Before It’s Too Late”

2009-04-07T11:10:00.002+01:00

Is there anyone to help me before it’s too late? That is the question asked by a member of Iraqi-LGBT in Baghdad, who says he is to be executed, in a letter released at the weekend by Iraqi-LGBT in London.

The handwritten letter in Arabic was received by the group in London last week, the writer claiming that he has received the death sentence for belonging to Iraqi-LGBT – a banned organisation in the country.

Releasing the letter to UK Gay News, Iraqi-LGBT requested independent translation – and this was done by two separate translators in the USA.

“We are confident that the letter is genuine,” Ali Hili said, adding that the name on the letter is known to him.

“I have known this person for the past 18 months,” he said.

“At the moment, we think that there are five gays among the 128 people who are reported to be awaiting execution,” Mr. Hili said.

And he added that while the Ministry of Interior is officially denying that there are five people sentenced to death for having contact with Iraqi-LGBT, he has spoken to someone in the Ministry who has confirmed the five death sentences.

In the letter released by Iraqi-LGBT in London, the writer claims that at his court case he was not permitted to defend himself, or even get legal representation.

It is virtually impossible to check on the authenticity of the letter, which translated into English, with names and an address removed, says:

Call for help.

“My name is [name and address removed], Baghdad, Iraq.

I was detained at my residence December 15, 2008 after midnight, by the Ministry of Interior.

During the detention process, they hit me on the head and my rear end to make me confess that I am a member of the Iraqi-LGBT.

Later on the Ministry of Interior transferred me to the criminal justice court in al Karkh, and after a short trial I was sentenced to death.

I was sentenced without given the chance to defend myself or to hire an attorney. Two days later I was returned to the same place and was told that the execution will take place in two weeks.

Please pass this message to [my friend] in London. I just wish to tell him not to forget about my mother and siblings, I was their only supporter.

I am all hopeful that Allah will show Iraqis a life with no death sentences.
And lastly, I ask you for help.

Is there anyone to help me before it is too late?”

Gays killed in Baghdad as clerics urge clampdown

2009-04-05T09:48:00.002+01:00

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Two gay men were killed in Baghdad's Sadr City slum, a local official said on Saturday, and police said they had found the bodies of four more after clerics urged a crackdown on a perceived spread of homosexuality.

Homosexuality is prohibited almost everywhere in the Middle East, but conditions have become especially dangerous for gays and lesbians in Iraq since the rise of religious militias after U.S.-led forces toppled Saddam Hussein six years ago.

"Two young men were killed on Thursday. They were sexual deviants. Their tribes killed them to restore their family honor," a Sadr City official who declined to be named said.

The police source who declined to be named said the bodies of four gay men were unearthed in Sadr City on March 25, each bearing a sign reading "pervert" in Arabic on their chests.

Sermons condemning homosexuality were read at the last two Friday prayer gatherings in Sadr City, a sprawling Baghdad slum of some 2 million people. The slum is a bastion of support for fiery Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mehdi Army militia.

The Mehdi Army has frozen its activities over the last year and government forces have wrested control of the slum.

Many young men who might have cut their hair short and grown beards when religious gangs controlled much of Iraq now dress in a more Western style as government forces take back control.

Some are now accused of being gay, and residents of Sadr City say at least one coffee shop has become a gay hangout.

A member of the slum's Sadrist office said the Mehdi Army was not involved in the killings, but said homosexuality was now more widespread since the Mehdi Army lost control of the slum.
"This (homosexuality) has spread because of the absence of the Mehdi Army, the spread of sexual films and satellite television and a lack of government surveillance," said the office's Sheikh Ibrahim al-Gharawi, a Shi'ite cleric.

Homosexual acts are punishable by up to seven years in prison in Iraq. A gay Iraqi man said any alleged crimes should be left to the law to deal with.

"If they've committed a crime, then there is the law. Killing is a big sin," he said, giving his name as Laith.

STOP EXECUTIONS OF GAY IRAQIS

2009-03-27T16:43:00.004Z

STOP EXECUTIONS OF GAY IRAQIS
MEMBERS OF IRAQI LGBT GROUP ON DEATH ROW
ACTION NEEDED TO HALT JUDICIAL EXECUTIONS

London, 30 March 2009

Urgent action is needed to halt the execution of 128 prisoners on death row in Iraq. Many of those awaiting execution were convicted for the ‘crime’ of homosexuality, according to IRAQI-LGBT, a UK based organisation of Iraqis supporting gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people in Iraq.

According to Ali Hili of IRAQI-LGBT, the Iraqi authorities plan to start executing them in batches of 20 from this week.

IRAQI-LGBT urgently requests that the UK Government, Human Rights Groups and the United Nations Human Rights Commission intervene with due speed to prevent this tragic miscarriage of justice from going ahead.

“We have information and reports on members of our community whom been arrested and waiting for execution for the crimes of homosexuality,’’ said Mr Hili. “Iraqi lgbt has been a banned from running our activities on Iraqi soil.”

“Raids by the Iraqi police and ministry of interior forces cost our group the disappearing and killing of 17 members working for Iraqi lgbt since 2005,” added Mr Hili.

“Death penalty has been increasing at an alarming rate in Iraq since the new Iraqi regime reintroduced it in August 2004.
In 2008 at least 285 people were sentenced to death, and at least 34 executed. In 2007 at least 199 people were sentenced to death and 33 were executed, while in 2006 at least 65 people were put to death. The actual figures could be much higher as there are no official statistics for the number of prisoners facing execution,” he said.

IRAQI LGBT is concerned that the Iraqi authorities have not disclosed the identities of those facing imminent execution, stoking fears that many of them may have been sentenced to death after trials that failed to satisfy international standards for fair trial.

Most are likely to have been sentenced to death by the Central Criminal Court of Iraq (CCCI), whose proceedings consistently fall short of international standards for fair trial. Some are likely to have. Allegations of torture are not being investigated adequately or at all by the CCCI. Torture of detainees held by Iraqi security forces remains rife.

Iraq’s creaking judicial system is simply unable to guarantee fair trials in ordinary criminal cases, and even less so in capital cases, with the result, we fear, that numerous people have gone to their death after unfair trials.

The Iraqi government must order an immediate halt to these executions and establish a moratorium on all further executions in Iraq, particularly since due process cannot be guaranteed. The state executing people for ‘morals’ crimes is also obviously unacceptable and deplorable.

Amnesty International has called on the Iraqi authorities to make public all information pertaining to the 128 people, including their full names, details of the charges against them, the dates of their arrest, trial and appeal and their current places of detention.

The immediate urgent priority is to Support and Donate Money to LGBT activists in Iraq in order to assist their efforts to help other Lesbians, Gay, Bisexuals and Trans gender Iraqi's facing death, persecution and systematic Targeting by the Iraqi Police and Badr and Sadr Militia and to raise awareness about the wave of homophobic murders in Iraq to the outside world.
Funds raised will also help provide LGBTs under threat of killing with refuge in the safer parts of Iraq (including safe houses, food, electricity, medical help) and assist efforts help them seek refuge in neighboring countries.

Iraqi Lgbt
22 Notting Hill Gate
Unit # 111
London , W11 3JE
United Kingdom
Mob: ++44 798 1959 453
Website : http://iraqilgbtuk.blogspot.com/

Gay Iraqi could face death penalty if deportation goes ahead.

2009-02-05T15:02:00.000Z

Asylum seeker would become seventh gay Iraqi to be returned from the UK to country where homosexuality is punishable by death

A gay Iraqi man due for deportation tomorrow has been told by the UK Border Agency to conduct his relationships "in private" on his return to Iraq, where homosexuality is punishable by death.

Campaign group Iraqi LGBT says the asylum seeker will become the seventh gay Iraqi to be returned to the country by the UK, despite the country being one of only nine in the world where homosexual people are executed.

Though a ruling was made in September 2007 allowing two gay Iraqis to remain in the UK, campaigners working on behalf of the man facing deportation tomorrow say his case was held too long ago to benefit from the change in case law achieved in 2007.

Keith Best, the director of the Immigration Advisory Service, told the Guardian that the government ought to give the asylum seeker a fresh hearing.

The United Kingdom Border Agency (UKBA) has said that the man's homosexuality did not form the basis of his original asylum application in 2001 and that his subsequent conviction for seeking to stay in the country illegally makes him an untrustworthy defendant, undermining his claim to be gay.

Sarah Teather, the Liberal Democrats' housing spokeswoman, who is the Iraqi's MP, is perplexed by a recommendation from the UKBA that the Iraqi conduct his relationships in private.

The document says: "Even if your client's homosexuality were to be established it is viewed that it would be possible for your client to conduct such relationships in private on his return to Iraq. This would allow your client to express his sexuality, albeit in a more limited way than he could do elsewhere."

Teather, the MP for Brent East, said: "Immigration ministers need to show some humanity. If this deportation goes ahead there is a terrible risk that this man will be killed. How can we possibly claim to be a country that values human rights if we are willing to endanger a life in this way?"

Best said: "This is an incredible position. They [the UKBA] cannot say that on the one hand they do not believe him to be homosexual and then recommend ways in which he can cover up his homosexuality."

In September 2007 two gay victims of attempted assassination attempts by Shia Islamist death squads in Iraq were granted asylum in the UK after having their initial applications turned down by the Home Office despite compelling evidence of homophobic persecution.

That case overturned the claim that national governments did not recognise homophobic persecution as a legitimate ground for asylum under the 1951 refugee convention.

Homosexuality has been punishable by death in Iraq since 2001, when Saddam Hussein's government amended the country's penal code. The move was thought to be an overture to the country's Islamic conservatives, whose support Saddam latterly tried to win.

Iraqi LGBT says that more than 430 gay men have been murdered in Iraq since 2003. Safe houses are reported to operate in Baghdad in which some 40 young gay men hide.

The asylum seeker is scheduled to leave the UK tomorrow on an 8.30am flight but this may be delayed since the government has yet to reply to the representations made on his behalf and he cannot be deported until that point.

Kurdish doctor jailed for writing about homosexual sex in Iraq.

2008-12-04T13:02:00.003Z

A leading press freedom organisation has called for the release from prison of a doctor sentenced to six months by a Kurdish judge for writing an medical article about sodomy.

Adel Hussein was convicted of offending public decency with his article in newspaper Hawlati and sentenced on November 24th in the city of Arbil, the capital of Kurdish-controlled Iraq.

Reporters Without Borders said:
"Sexual practices are part of the individual freedoms that a democratic state is supposed to promote and protect.

"Furthermore, Hussein did not defend homosexuality. He limited himself to describing a form of behaviour from a scientific viewpoint.

"We are astonished to learn that a press case has been tried under the criminal code.

"What was the point of adopting - and then liberalising - a press code in Iraq north region if people who contribute to the news media are still be tried under more repressive laws?"

RWB said Dr Hussein, a member of the Union of Kurdish Journalists and local TV presenter, was prosecuted as a result of a complaint brought by the city’s public prosecutor over a scientific article published in April 2007 that detailed the physical effects of sodomy.

He was fined 125,000 dinars (£72) in addition to his jail term.

The predominantly Kurdish region of northern Iraq is autonomous and has its own unicameral parliament.

In the rest of Iraq the deteriorating situation for gay and lesbian people has been documented by human rights groups.

A UN report in 2007 highlighted attacks on gays by militants and religious courts, supervised by clerics, where homosexuals allegedly would be 'tried,' 'sentenced' to death and then executed.

"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," said Alli HIli of Iraqi LGBT.

"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."

Gay Life, Gay Death in Iraq & The Sexual Cleansing of Iraq (2008)

2008-12-03T11:51:00.004Z

Sexual cleansing in Iraq

2008-09-25T16:08:00.002+01:00

Islamist death squads are hunting down gay Iraqis and summarily executing them

WATCH the video link below – and weep
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=uB7TcPGXlHY

By Peter Tatchell

The Guardian – 25 September 2008

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/25/iraq.humanrights

STOP PRESS: This morning, after this article was published, news came from Iraq that the coordinator of Iraqi LGBT in Baghdad, Bashar, aged 27, has been assassinated in a barber shop. Militias burst in and sprayed his body with bullets.

The so-called improved security situation in Iraq is not benefiting all Iraqis, especially not gay ones. Islamist death squads are engaged in a homophobic
killing spree, with the active encouragement of leading Muslim clerics, such as Moqtada al-Sadr, as Newsweek recently revealed.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/155656

One of these clerics, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the spiritual leader of Shia Islam, issued a fatwa urging the killing of lesbians and gays in the “worst, most severe way possible.”

http://gaycitynews.com/site/index.cfm?newsid=18202189&BRD=2729&PAG=461&dept_id=568864&rfi=8

The short film, Queer Fear - Gay Life, Gay Death in Iraq, produced by David Grey for Village Film, documents the tragic fates of a several individual gay Iraqis. You can view it here:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=uB7TcPGXlHY

Watch and weep. A truly poignant and moving revelation about the terrorisation and murder of Iraqi lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.

Since this film was made, the killings have continued and, many say, got worse.

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/07/24/gay.iraqis/index.html

For gay Iraqis there is little evidence of the transition to democracy. They don’t experience any new-found respect human rights. Life for them is even worse than under the tyrant Saddam Hussein.

It is a death sentence in today’s “liberated” Iraq to love a person of the same-sex, or for a woman to have sex outside of marriage, or for a Muslim to give up his / her faith or embrace another religion.

The reality on the ground is that theocracy is taking hold of the country, including in Basra, which was abandoned by the British military. In place of foreign occupation, the city’s inhabitants now endure the terror of fundamentalist militias and death squads. Those who are deemed insufficiently devout and pure are liable to be assassinated.

The death squads of the Badr Brigades and the Madhi Army are
targeting gays and lesbians, according to UN reports, in a systematic campaign of sexual cleansing. They proudly boast of their success, claiming that they have already exterminated all “perverts and sodomites” in many of the major cities.

http://articles.latimes.com/2007/aug/05/world/fg-iraqgay5
http://gaycitynews.com/site/index.cfm?newsid=17008100&BRD=2729&PAG=461&dept_id=568864&rfi=8
http://gaycitynews.com/site/index.cfm?newsid=17008200&BRD=2729&PAG=461&dept_id=568864&rfi=8
http://gaycitynews.com/site/index.cfm?newsid=18605093&BRD=2729&PAG=461&dept_id=568864&rfi=8

You can view photos of a few of the LGBT victims of these summary executions here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/outrage/sets/72157600042494571/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/outrage/sets/72057594087304767/

My friends in Iraq have relayed to me the tragic story of five gay activists, who belonged to the underground movement gay rights movement, Iraqi LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender).

Eye-witnesses confirm that they saw the men being led out of a house at gun-point by officers in police uniform. Yes, Iraqi police! Nothing has been heard of the five victims since then. In all probability, they have been executed by the police - or by Islamist death squads who have infiltrated the Iraqi police and who are using their uniforms to carry out so-called honour killings of gay people, unchaste women and many others.

The arrested and disappeared men were Amjad 27, Rafid 29, Hassan 24, Ayman 19 and Ali 21. As members of Iraq’s covert gay rights movement, for the previous few months they had been documenting the killing of lesbians and gays, relaying details of the murders to the outside world, and providing safe houses and support to other gay people fleeing the death squads.

Their abduction is just one of many outrages by anti-gay death squads. lslamist killers burst into the home of two lesbians in city of Najaf. They shot them dead, slashed their throats, and also murdered a young child who the women had rescued from the sex trade. The two women, both in their mid-30s, were members of Iraqi LGBT. They were providing a safe house for gay men on the run from death squads. By sheer luck, none of the men who were being given shelter in the house were at home when the assassins struck. They have since fled to Baghdad and are hiding in an Iraqi LGBT safe house there.

Large parts of Iraq are now under the de facto control of the militias and their death squad units. They enforce a harsh interpretation of Sharia law, summarily executing people for what they denounce as “crimes against Islam.” These “crimes” include listening to western pop music, wearing shorts or jeans, drinking alcohol, selling videos, working in a barber’s shop, homosexuality, dancing, having a Sunni name, adultery and, in the case of women, not being veiled or walking in the street unaccompanied by a male relative.

Two militias are doing most of the killing. They are the armed wings of major parties in the Bush and Brown-backed Iraqi government. Madhi is the militia of Muqtada al-Sadr, and Badr is the militia of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), which is the leading political force in Baghdad’s governing coalition. Both militias want to establish an Iranian-style religious dictatorship. The allied occupation of Iraq is bad enough. But if the Madhi or Badr militias gain in influence and strength, as seems likely in the long-term, it could result in a reign of religious terror many times worse.

Saddam Hussein was a bloody tyrant. I campaigned against his blood-stained misrule for nearly 30 years. But while Saddam was President, there was certainly no danger of gay people being assassinated in their homes and in the street by religious fanatics.

http://gaycitynews.com/site/index.cfm?newsid=17008362&BRD=2729&PAG=461&dept_id=568864&rfi=8

Since his overthrow, the violent persecution of lesbians and gays is much worse.
http://iraqilgbtuk.blogspot.com/2007/08/for-gays-in-iraq-life-of-constant-fear.html

Even children suspected of being gay are abducted and later found shot in the head.
http://gaycitynews.com/site/index.cfm?newsid=17008362&BRD=2729&PAG=461&dept_id=568864&rfi=8

Lesbian and gay Iraqis cannot seek the protection of the police, since the police are heavily infiltrated by fundamentalists, especially the Badr militia. The death squads can kill with impunity. Pro-fundamentalist ministers in the Iraqi government are turning a blind eye to the killings, and helping to protect the killers. Some “liberation”.
* Iraqi LGBT is appealing for funds to help the work of their members in Iraq. Since they don’t yet have a bank account, they request that cheques should be made payable to “OutRage!”, with a cover note marked “For Iraqi LGBT”, and sent to OutRage!, PO Box 17816, London SW14 8WT.
More information on Iraqi LGBT or to make a donation by PayPal

Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Do Kill

2008-08-27T08:27:00.002+01:00

Nobody wants to talk about gays in Iraq, much less who is killing them.

Lennox Samuels-Newsweek

When militiamen from the Mahdi Army came by the compact, two-story stone home in the Doura neighbourhood of Baghdad, they weren't looking for Sunnis to harass. They were hunting gays. "Bring us your son's cell phone," one ordered the middle-aged man who came to the gate. They wanted to check if his son, Nadir, had been calling foreigners--and in fact he had only hours earlier called this reporter to set up a meeting, and he had repeatedly called a gay nongovernmental organization (NGO) in London. Fortunately, Nadir was ready for them and produced a "clean" phone he keeps for just such a threat. This time they left, but vowed to come back if they found any evidence he was gay--or was talking to undesirable foreigners. Now that Iraq's sectarian war has cooled off, it's open season on homosexuals and others whose lifestyles infuriate religious hardliners.

Sometimes the act of reporting a story is revealing in itself--especially when it proves particularly difficult. This was the case when NEWSWEEK began looking into the problems of Iraq's homosexuals after hearing reports of secret safe houses around Baghdad where many of them were taking refuge from the militias' self-appointed morality police. After weeks of inquiries, NEWSWEEK managed to find Nadir and persuade him to arrange a visit to one of the safe houses he helps run. Instead, the Mahdi militia rousted him the night before. Established in 2004, the militia is the armed wing of the organization led by radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who has been an implacable foe of the Maliki government. Terrified, Nadir contacted people at the London-based gay NGO that finances the safe house, and they instructed him to break off the visit.

That was only one of many problems reporting on gays in Iraq. Iraqi authorities scoffed at the subject--when not scolding a reporter for even asking about it. Some of NEWSWEEK's own local staff were wary of the story. Virtually no government officials would sit for an interview. And the United Nations human-rights office, which has a big presence in Iraq, dodged the subject like a mine field. As with a number of Muslim societies where homosexuality is officially nonexistent but widely practiced, the policy in Iraq during Saddam Hussein's rule was "don't ask, don't tell." But that has changed. Iraqi LGBT, the London NGO that Nadir works for, says more than 430 gay men have been murdered in Iraq since 2003. For the country's beleaguered gays, it's a friendless landscape.

Many officials say they feel that in a country at war, there are more pressing concerns than gay rights. A Ministry of Justice judge rebuked a reporter for wasting time on such an issue, noting that "crimes of sodomy" are "very rare" in society and even rarer in the courts. "Most acts of homosexual people are being done in dark corners and, with corruption and paying bribes, they will be kept there for a long time, for it is not on the top of our priorities list, which is occupied by issues of terror, kidnapping and killing," said the judge, who would not allow his name to be used discussing gays. An adviser to the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said that of all the meetings he has attended, none ever touched on the rights--or even the existence--of homosexual Iraqis.

The only recourse for Iraqi gays seems to come from activists abroad. Iraqi LGBT, which was founded to defend the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) Iraqis, looks after about 40 young men between the ages of 14 and 28 in several Baghdad safe houses. There they are fed, can watch TV, hang out and sleep in cramped quarters, their beds inches apart. They stay away from neighbors and rarely leave their immediate area. "I hope you can see how sensitive and very important the security issue is for the safe houses," said Ali Hili, who fled Iraq and received asylum in Britain.

Hili continues to use a pseudonym to protect himself and insulate relatives still in Iraq. He has not returned home in eight years but does visit Syria and Jordan to raise money and check on an underground railroad that helps spirit some gay men out of Iraq. He says the government tries to monitor the group's activities. Saif, one of the older residents at an Iraqi LGBT house, recalls Saddam's repressive but secular regime wistfully. "Those were the most beautiful days of our lives," he says. "The fall [of Saddam] was the worst thing to happen."

Most people seem to prefer that the subject just go away. A written request for an interview at the Legal Section of the Ministry of Human Rights was greeted with a suggestion to delete the word "gays." A sympathetic senior government official warned that a direct request to talk to a minister about gays could result in a short conversation. "I would ask about women, displaced people, children and others before you get to that," he offered. Officials at the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs and the Human Rights ministry maintain that they do not keep statistics about gays, largely because the number is so small, "barely mentioned in Iraq" according to one of them.

Even relatively liberal people in Iraq seem to have harsh attitudes toward this subject. "These people are not welcome in the society because they are against the social, natural and religious rules," said one well-educated Iraqi who did not want to be identified more closely. A Baghdad executive said religion and tradition have made the overwhelming majority of Iraqis hostile to homosexuals. "Nobody is interested in talking about this at all," he says with a grim chuckle. A handful of gay men told NEWSWEEK harrowing stories about being cast out of their homes or savagely attacked by the storm troopers of virtue: Shia extremists among Badr Corps operatives (many of whom are now in the Iraqi Security Forces) or groups like the Mahdi Army, and sometimes both. But when told of such atrocities one Iraqi acquaintance blamed the victims, calling them "the lowest humans."

Persecution of gays will stop only if Iraqis can abandon centuries-old prejudices. They would have to acknowledge that human rights don't cover only the humans they like. Insisting that gays are just a few undesirable perverts who "should be killed"--as one Iraqi who works in journalism put it--encourages an atmosphere of impunity no matter the offense. Killing gays becomes "honorable." And raping them is OK because it isn't considered a homosexual act--only being penetrated or providing oral sex is.

Ali Hili says the government, security forces, judiciary and religious establishment are complicit in terrorizing gays. Since the late-evening visit by the militiamen, Nadir has moved to another part of Baghdad and stayed away from home. "They said, 'We will get you even if you fly to God'," he says. Changing Iraq's attitudes toward its gay minority may prove even harder than ending the war.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/155656

Gays in Iraq terrorized by threats, rape, murder

2008-07-25T08:57:00.004+01:00

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Kamal was just 16 when gunmen snatched him off the streets of Baghdad, stuffed him in the trunk of a car and whisked him away to a house. But the real terror was about to begin.

The men realized he was gay, Kamal said, when he took his shirt off and they saw that his chest was shaved.

"They told me to take off my clothes to rape me or they would kill me immediately. This moment was the worst moment in my life," he said, weeping as he spoke of the 2005 ordeal.

"I was watching them taking off their clothes, preparing to rape me. I did not know what to do, so I started shouting loudly, 'Please do not do that! I will ask my family to give you whatever you want.'

His pleas went unheeded. "The other two kidnappers took off my clothes by force, and, at that time, I saw them as three dirty animals trying to tear my body apart."

He was held for 15 days, released only after his family paid a $1,500 ransom. He was raped every day. Only once, he said, was he allowed to talk to his family during captivity. "I told my family that I was beaten by them, but I did not dare to tell my family that I was raped by them. I could not say it, it's too much shame."

CNN spoke with Kamal, now 18, and his 21-year-old friend Rami about what it's like to be gay in Iraq. Coming out as gay is not easy in any country, but to do so in Iraq could mean a death sentence or torture.

The two men rarely show feelings toward each other in public. They spend a lot of time in Internet cafes in Baghdad, surfing gay chat rooms and seeking contacts with other gay men in Iraq and elsewhere.

Since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the situation for gays and lesbians in Iraq has deteriorated. Ridiculed under Hussein, many now find themselves the targets of violence, according to humanitarian officials.

Lesbians are also victims of harassment and violence, but not nearly as often as gay men.

It's unknown how many homosexuals have been killed by militias in the lawless streets of Iraq's cities, but some Web sites post pictures of Iraqis they say were killed for being gay.

One photo on the Iraqi Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender site shows a group of men standing around three male bodies sprawled on a street, blood pouring from their heads. "Gay Iraqi victims of the police and death squads," the site says.

A U.N. report on human rights in Iraq reinforces the accusations of violence. Although gays are supposed to be protected by law in Iraq, it says, they face extreme brutality.

"Armed Islamic groups and militias have been known to be particularly hostile toward homosexuals, frequently and openly engaging in violent campaigns against them," the report said, adding that homosexuals have been murdered.

"Militias are reportedly threatening families of men believed to be homosexual, stating that they will begin killing family members unless the men are handed over or killed by the family," it said.

The report was issued at the end of 2006 and is the last U.N. study to touch on the subject.

Human rights experts say homosexuals are targeted for cultural reasons as well.

"Gay men and lesbians in Iraq face a lot of risks right now, because homosexuality is sometimes interpreted by people in Iraq as being a Western import," said Scott Portman with the Heartland Alliance, a group that promotes human rights worldwide. "So they can sometimes be targeted by insurgent groups or militias, in part, because of animosity toward the West and, in part, because homosexuality is not well-accepted in Iraqi society."

He added, "the biggest threats right now are from militia organizations, who will attack and actually sometimes kill gay men and women."

Kamal and Rami say the dangers are all too real in Baghdad -- and they live in secrecy not to shame their families.

"I would rather commit suicide than allow my family to find out I am gay," Rami said.

Kamal said he often pretends to have girlfriends in social settings and tells his friends he's dating girls. "I am also careful with the way I dress -- not to show them that I am gay, especially my family."

What would his family do if they found out?

"They will force me to give it up, and I cannot do that," he said. "The 'normal' people cannot live in Iraq. Imagine how the life is for gays."

Rami added, "I do not know why people hate gays even though so many have this tendency. But still they hate it."

Homosexuality is a touchy subject for many Iraqis. When CNN asked Iraqis in Baghdad how they felt about homosexuals, we found intolerance to be widespread.

One man said he considers gays no different from "criminals and terrorists." Another claimed that homosexuality was "illegal under Islamic law, and [gays] should be punished by law like criminals."

Rami said he once fell in love with a man who was part of the Mehdi Army, a Shiite insurgent group loyal to the radical anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

Their relationship eventually soured.

"One day he told me he would come over to my house and kill me in front of my family," Rami said. "I told him I would come outside and be killed in the street because I do not want my family to find out I am gay."

Both men hope to escape Iraq. They say their ideal destination would be San Francisco, California. For now, both of them keep their feelings secret.

Kamal is still tormented by what happened to him nearly three years ago.

"During my sleep, I only see nightmares, and I start crying. My family thought it was because they were beating me."

He paused. "Only my close friend Rami knows about this secret."

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/07/24/gay.iraqis/index.html

Also see the Video: http://edition.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2008/07/24/pleitgen.iraq.gay.dangers.cnn?iref=videosearch

Stop aid to homophobic countries says Tatchell

2008-07-23T11:33:00.005+01:00

Tatchell picketed in San Diego on Saturday

Speaking to the crowd at the San Diego Pride Human Rights Vigil on Friday 18 July, veteran human rights campaigner Mr Tatchell called for an end to aid for, "viciously homophobic countries like Jamaica, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Uganda, Iraq and Nigeria."
"Tyrannies should not be rewarded: No US aid for anti-gay regimes," Mr. Tatchell said.
In 2003 the Bush administration pledged $20 billion for the reconstruction of Iraq, according to Forbes magazine.

The reconstruction of Iraq is the largest rebuilding taken on by the US since the Marshall plan helped to rebuild post WW2 Europe.

Under Saddam Hussein's regime sodomy was criminalised in 2001. However, there were no recorded executions or imprisonments.

It is only in recent years that militias have sought and murdered members of the Iraqi LGBT community.

The US also pledged $15 billion to curb the AIDS epidemic in Nigeria.

Homosexuality is a punishable offence under the strict Sharia law that governs the West African country. Gay men can be handed down a sentence of 14 years imprisonment, or 100 lashes for unmarried men and 1 years imprisonment and death by stoning for married men caught in homosexual acts.

In 2004 US aid to Uganda reached $65 million, of that $56 million was donated as emergency food for Ugandans affected by conflict.

The Ugandan President, Yoweri Museveni recently branded homosexuality a "negative foreign culture."
Since President Museveni's time in office began, Uganda's LGBT community has been subject to violent attacks and harassment. Many have fled the country and are now claiming asylum in Europe.

US aid to Pakistan in 2006 reached $2.8 million and was used to support a national health survey to improve health care in country.

In Pakistan having an alternative sexuality to heterosexuality can lead to life imprisonment, and Gay Nigerians face 14 years in prison.

In Jamaica, a recent survey found anti-gay statements made by the Prime Minister Bruce Golding, had boosted his popularity.

70% of the country do not believe in equal rights for the LGBT community.

After Hurricane Ivan devastated the Caribbean Island of Jamaica in 2005, the year before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the US donated $18 million in aid to help Jamaica recover.

Mr Tatchell also hit out at homophobia within the United States. He called for a boycott of all Hyatt hotels after owner Douglas Manchester for helping to fund proposition 8, the move to ban same sex marriage in California.

The international hotelier has three hotels in the UK, two of which are in London.
Protesters, including Tatchell, picketed the San Diego Hyatt hotel on Saturday. One protester said Hyatt "put so much money into advertising this hotel in gay magazines, and it's a huge slap in the face."

New Video Footage Show the treatment of LGBT People In Iraq by Police.

2008-01-25T02:47:00.000Z

Three Iraq safe houses forced to close

2007-11-06T13:15:00.000Z

No funds to pay rent or utility bills

30 gay people left to fend for themselves

London and Baghdad – 6 November 2007

Three out of five gay safe houses in Iraq are closing down, due to a lack of funds to pay their rent and utility bills.

The refuges were set up two years ago, to provide a place of safety for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (lgbt) Iraqis who have fled homophobic threats and attempts to kill them by religious fundamentalists and death squads.

“Iraqi lgbt has made a huge effort to keep all of its five safe houses running, to provide refuge for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Iraqis who have fled homophobic violence and threats to kill them,” said Ali Hili, founder and coordinator of the human rights group, Iraqi lgbt.

“Many of the people we helped have been targeted by the Iraqi police and by Shia militia and other fundamentalist factions.

“Because of a lack of funds, three safe houses have had to close their doors. This decision will break a lot of hearts, but we have no other choice. We don’t have the financial support to sustain these refuges.

“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.

“Several months ago, two lesbians working with Iraqi lgbt were assassinated in the safe house they were running in Najaf, along with a young boy the women had rescued from the sex industry.

“We feel deserted by the international gay community. Few people seem to care about our fate.

“Many brave lgbt Iraqis assisted our efforts. We would like to acknowledge their exceptional commitment.

“Sabah, Gada, Sana and Mona are four lesbians who dedicated their time and energy to provide food, cleaning and support to people in the safe houses in their area. We’d also like to thank Hasan , Safa , Jawad, Laith , Gasaq and Rami,” said Mr Hilli.

“The world has let us down so badly,” said Sabah, a 29 year old lesbian, who worked as a carer and ran a safe house in the south of Iraq.

“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,” said Safa, a gay man in the city of Ammara, where he has been hiding for the last eight months from the police and Shia death squads. Safa fled his hometown of Najaf because he was known to be gay and feared assassination.

“Iraqi lgbt is doing amazing, heroic work,” said Peter Tatchell of the UK-based lgbt organisation, OutRage!

“It’s members inside Iraq are taking huge personal risks to protect the victims of homophobic persecution. Their efforts are truly inspirational. I urge the international lgbt community to rally round and raise the funds needed to sustain the remaining two safe houses. Please give generously,” he urged.

Meanwhile, Iraqi lgbt blames the western invasion and occupation of their country for unleashing religious fanaticism and causing the current homophobic killing spree:

“Much of the world failed to oppose the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and to prevent what has turned out to be the worst western intervention catastrophe in modern history,” added Mr Hili.

“The Iraqi gay community feels badly let down in our moment of need.

“Are gay people in the United States, Britain and Australia aware of what their governments have done to our country? 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 western-backed ruling coalition,” said Mr Hili

Can you make a donation to help Iraqi lgbt sustain its magnificent efforts?

The UK-based gay human rights group OutRage! is working with Iraqi LGBT to support its work. Iraqi LGBT is coordinated by Ali Hili from the safety of London UK. The group does not have its own bank account. Operating an Iraqi LGBT bank account in Baghdad would be suicide. For this reason, it has to operate its finances from London. All the group’s members in London are Iraqi refugees seeking asylum. Their lack of proper legal status makes it difficult for them to open a bank account in the UK. This is why Iraqi LGBT is asking that cheques be made payable to “OutRage!”, with a cover note marked “For Iraqi LGBT”, and sent to OutRage!, PO Box 17816, London SW14 8WT, England, UK. OutRage! then forwards the donations received to Ali Hili and Iraqi LGBT for wire transfer to activists in Baghdad.

More information:

Ali Hili 079 819 594 53 (from abroad +44 79 819 594 53)

Blog: http://iraqilgbtuk.blogspot.com/

Email: iraqilgbt@yahoo.co.uk

Photos of some of the LGBT victims are available here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/outrage/sets/72157600042494571/

NB: Sorry, we do not have high resolution versions.

END.

2 'safe houses' for gays in Iraq set to close for lack of donations

2007-10-18T13:49:00.000+01:00

UK Gay News

LONDON -- Up to 25 gay men will next month have to ‘take their chances’ in Iraq where religious militia regularly seek out gays and execute them. Two ‘safe houses’ for gays will be forced to close at the end month – due to lack of cash, it was learned last night.

And appeal for funds was made last month by the London-based IraqiLGBT group, which runs the five safe houses. The appeal was promoted on a number of LGBT online sires and blogs in several countries.

But just under £1,000 ($US2,000, €1,400) is all has been raised as a result of the appeal. The amount barely covers the cost of running one safe house for a month.

"I have come to a decision on closing down two safe houses because I can not keep promising people things we can not deliver," Ali Hili, who heads IraqiLGBT, told UK Gay News.

The cost of running one safe house for a month is about £900 ($1,800). This includes £400 for rent £200 for the salaries of two guards – an essential part of the security arrangements, and £300 per month for gas, fuel for electricity generators, food, clean drinking water, hygienic supplies etc.

Each house accommodates between 10 to 12 gay men in a relative secure environment.

Since the US-led coalition invasion of Iraq, gay people in Iraq have suffered particularly intense persecution.

Violence against all the gay community has intensified sharply since late 2005, when Iraq’s leading Shiite Muslim cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, issued a fatwa (religious decree) which declared that gays and lesbians should be “killed in the worst, most severe way”.

For gays in Iraq, a life of constant fear

2007-08-21T14:20:00.000+01:00

Since the U.S.-led invasion, homosexuals have been increasingly targeted by militias and police, human rights groups say.

By Molly Hennessy-Fiske, Times Staff Writer
August , 2007

BAGHDAD — Samir Shaba sits in a restaurant, nervously describing gay life in Iraq. He speaks in a low voice, occasionally glancing over his shoulder.

The heavyset, clean-shaven Christian says that before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, he frequented the city's gay blogs, online chat rooms and dance clubs, where he wore flashy tight clothes, his hair long and loose to his shoulders.

After the invasion, he and other gays and lesbians were driven underground by sectarian violence and religious extremists. Shaba, 25, packed his flashy clothes away, started wearing baseball caps and baggy T-shirts and stopped visiting clubs and chat rooms. But he couldn't bear to cut his hair.

"I cannot change everything immediately," he said, fingering his black ponytail. "I suffered because I didn't cut it."

Recently, Shaba said, police commandos spotted his hair as he was riding in a taxi through a checkpoint in central Baghdad. Suspecting that he was gay, the four commandos dragged him out of the taxi by his hair, and forced him into an armored car. They demanded his cellphone, cash and sex.

When he refused, they beat him with a baton and gang-raped him. He rubbed the back of his shirt, feeling for the scars.

"They got what they wanted because I thought otherwise I would lose my life," Shaba said, and he began to weep. "They threatened me that if I told anyone, they would kill me."

Heightened attacks

Human rights groups say that Iraqi gays are increasingly targeted by militias and police. The United Nations and State Department have issued reports documenting some of the more recent killings.

A U.N. report in January cited attacks on gays by militants, as well as the existence of "religious courts, supervised by clerics, where homosexuals allegedly would be 'tried,' 'sentenced' to death and then executed."

Iraqi leaders dismiss those allegations, and Middle East experts say it's difficult to tell whether the attacks are state-sanctioned.

"Nobody's paying attention to this issue," said Ali Dabbagh, spokesman for Prime Minister Nouri Maliki. "It is not the custom of the people of Iraq. Not only Iraq, but the whole region."

In October 2005, Iraq's leading Shiite Muslim cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, issued a fatwa, or religious decree, on his website forbidding homosexuality and declaring that gays and lesbians should be "punished, in fact, killed."

"The people involved should be killed in the worst, most severe way," the decree said.

The fatwa against gay men was removed from Sistani's website last year, but it was not revoked, said Ali Hili, an Iraqi gay-rights activist living in London who petitioned Sistani's office to remove it.

Hili compiles details of the killings of homosexuals, including photographs of victims, and posts them online. Included in his list of victims are:

• Anwar, 34, a taxi driver who ran a safe house for gays in the southern city of Najaf. Hili said Anwar was shot execution-style after he was stopped at a police checkpoint in March.

• Nouri, 29, a tailor in the southern city of Karbala who had received death threats for being gay and was beheaded in February, Hili said.

• Hazim, 21, of Baghdad also received threats, Hili said, and after police seized him at home in February, his body was found with several gunshots to the head.

Shaba said his cousin Alan, 26, who also was gay, was shot in the head one day when he went to answer the door while the two were having lunch. Although Alan might have been targeted because he was working as an interpreter with U.S. forces in the Green Zone, Shaba said he thought his cousin was killed because he was openly gay.

"There are other translators in our neighborhood, and nobody killed them," he said.

Difficult to discern

Given the pervasiveness of sectarian violence in Iraq, it's hard to tell whether such men are targeted for being gay, said filmmaker Parvez Sharma, a gay Muslim based in New York. Sharma just finished filming a documentary called "A Jihad for Love," set in Iraq and a dozen other Middle Eastern countries. It is to be released this fall.

Sharma's film concentrates on the prosecution of 52 gay men arrested in 2001 aboard a floating nightclub on the Nile; they became known as the "Cairo 52." No similar incident has been documented in Iraq, Sharma said.

"It's very difficult to tell whether there is a pogrom of any sort to kill gay men," he said, but the environment for gays in Iraq has clearly soured.

In the 1980s, Baghdad and Cairo were gay social centers, Sharma said. Many Iraqi gays settled into straight marriages and had families, but many continued to have homosexual relationships on the side.

Although President Saddam Hussein shut down many of Baghdad's gay bars in the 1990s and passed a law against sodomy in 2001, Iraqi gays and lesbians still socialized.

After the 2003 invasion, a man who gave his name as Ahmed still cruised Rubaie Street, a once popular gay thoroughfare in the eastern Baghdad neighborhood of Zayuna, but he was not openly gay, he said.

A year and a half ago, one of the men he'd met there showed up at his apartment wearing an Iraqi army uniform. He threatened to tell fellow soldiers that Ahmed was gay unless he paid a bribe of 160,000 dinars, about $135.

That was a probable death sentence, he said.

Ahmed paid, fled the country for Amman, Jordan, and considers himself among the lucky ones.

A 31-year-old gay pharmacist in the mostly Sunni west Baghdad neighborhood of Amiriya, said several of his friends were killed for being gay. He is often followed and stopped at checkpoints, he said. He spoke on condition of anonymity, for fear that he might be attacked.

He dreams of getting a visa to Sweden, Germany or the Netherlands, which have accepted the bulk of Iraqi refugees, and then applying for asylum because of political persecution.

The United States has recognized asylum claims by gays and lesbians since 1994, but the applications of only about 14% of lesbians and 16% of gay men have been approved, according to the San Francisco-based Asylum Documentation Program of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission.

In Iraq, the wait for visas is long. Fake travel documents cost at least $15,000 on the black market, out of the pharmacist's price range.

"I'm just looking for salvation," he said. "Maybe next month you will call and my family will say, 'Oh, he is killed.' "

'A cultural issue'

A U.N. spokesman said it was difficult to determine how many gays have been targeted and whether the Iraqi government is trying to help them.

"They have said they are trying to improve human rights for all Iraqis, but they are not even willing to say there are gays in Iraq. This is a cultural issue," U.N. spokesman Said Arikat said.

Wijdan Mikaeil, Iraq's minister of human rights, said her office had not received reports of attacks on gays. She said that gays may be afraid to come forward but that the United Nations is over-emphasizing the problem.

"The Iraqi people have been attacked all across Iraq — not because they are gay, but because of the sectarian issue," she said.

The State Department has urged Iraq to prevent attacks on gays, spokeswoman Janelle Hironimus said, but the insurgency and sectarian violence have made it difficult for the government to protect human rights.

Gabor Rona, international legal director at New York-based Human Rights First, said the chaos shouldn't stop the U.S. government from pressuring Iraqi authorities to hold security forces accountable for abusing gays.

"We may not have any ability to do anything about suicide bombings and insurgent attacks, but we may have the ability to influence the Iraqi government if they have a hand in this," Rona said.

Some U.S. legislators are demanding that the State Department act.

Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) and Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), both openly gay lawmakers, sent a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in June demanding that she investigate attacks on Iraqi gays and pressure Maliki to respond.

Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) has sponsored legislation that would prioritize gay Iraqi refugees in an expanded Iraqi refugee program.

Ahmed, now living in Amman, said U.S. forces in Iraq should investigate reports of assaults on gays and ensure that those responsible are punished.

"At least if they catch one of them, they may be afraid to do it again."

Hate army beat gay students

2007-07-15T09:15:00.000+01:00

BY Claudia Cahalane

Two gay Iraqi students were kidnapped, stripped, beaten and blindfolded at gunpoint, before being handcuffed with wire and forced into a car boot by two members of the Mahdi Army.
The students, known as 23-year-old Ahmed and 24-year-old Zaid, met their kidnappers, who were posing as gay men, in an internet chatroom in May. Upon meeting up in real life for a “date”, the captors drove their victims to a deserted area and attacked them.

The “army” men demanded to know the names and phone numbers of other gay men and went through the details of everyone listed in their mobile phones.

The students were expecting to be executed, but were left in the secluded area by their attackers and later rescued by a passing motorist.

Ahmed and Zaid have been helped by gay rights group Iraqi LGBT and local lesbian Dina H, who runs a safe house for gays and lesbians. They have now vowed to hide their sexuality to protect themselves.

The kidnappers were part of the violently homophobic Mahdi Army – a militia of firebrand fundamentalist Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who is fighting to establish an Islamist dictatorship in Iraq, said Peter Tatchell of UK-based gay rights group Outrage.

The Mahdi Army has been involved in the torture and execution of gays, women and anyone else who does not conform to, its “harsh, perverse interpretation of Islam,” added Tatchell.

Ali Hili, a gay Iraqi refugee, who coordinates Iraqi LGBT from London, said that police in Iraq had been infiltrated by Shia extremists using the cover of the police to kill gays and lesbians.

He added: “Iraqi LGBT needs donations to help gay people who are fleeing the death squads off the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigades.”

YOU CAN SAVE LIVES, YOU CAN MAKE A CHANGE.

2007-06-26T12:55:00.000+01:00

Two Members of US Congress Protest Persecution of Gay Iraqis

2007-06-15T09:07:00.000+01:00

Representatives Tammy Baldwin and Barney Frank

Condoleezza Rice Asked to Intervene

WASHINGTON, June 14, 2007

Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) and Congressman Barney Frank (D- MA) have written to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice urging the State Department to investigate reports of violent persecution of homosexual Iraqis by Islamic groups and militias.

The two lawmakers cited a United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq's (UNAMI) Human Rights Report issued for the period of November 1 to December 31, 2006, which stated that an environment of “impunity and lawlessness” currently permeating Iraq has invited open and violent campaigns against LGBT Iraqis.

“In 2005, the Iraqi people adopted a Constitution guaranteeing that ‘every individual has the right to enjoy life, security and liberty’.

“Unfortunately, such promises have been particularly eroded for LGBT Iraqis, who must live in constant fear of being targeted for execution.

“We therefore urge you to raise this serious issue with the Iraqi leadership and press them to take immediate action to halt the killings of Iraqi homosexuals,” Baldwin and Frank wrote.

Representatives Baldwin and Frank asked Secretary Rice to raise the issue and express her concerns to Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki and President Jalal Talabani, while urging the Iraqi government to step up its protection of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) Iraqis and stop these senseless attacks by the militias.

Full text of the letter:

Dear Secretary Rice:

We are writing to express our strong concerns regarding recent reports that Iraqi homosexuals have been systematically persecuted in Iraq under a violent campaign led by Islamic groups and militias. We urge the State Department to investigate such allegations and report its findings as part of the annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. We also urge you to raise the issue and express your concerns to Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki and President Jalal Talabani, while urging the Iraqi government to step up its protection of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) Iraqis and stop these senseless attacks by the militias.

According to the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq's (UNAMI) Human Rights Report issued for the period of November 1 to December 31, 2006, an environment of "impunity and lawlessness" currently permeating Iraq has invited open and violent campaigns against LGBT Iraqis. According to news reports, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the chief spiritual leader of Iraqi Shia Muslims, issued a "'fatwa,' or religiously-inspired legal pronouncement, in October 2005 calling for death for all gays and lesbians in "the most severe way possible." While the fatwa was eventually removed from Sistani's website last May, it was never revoked, and the decree has led to the deployment of anti-gay death squads by the military arm of the Supreme Council for the Islamic revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), the Badr Corps. As a result, violence against gay Iraqis surged in 2006.

According to Iraqi LGBT, a London-based human rights group working to support the human rights of gay Iraqis, twenty-six of its members have been killed since 2003, including the murder of two minors - eleven-year-old Ameer and fourteen-year-old Ahmed who were forced into child prostitution--in 2006. In addition, a mass kidnapping of five gay men from the Shaab area of Iraq took place during the first week of December 2006. All are now presumed dead.

In April of this year, Iraqi LGBT documented that eight additional murders took place in 2007, while several other gay activists were arrested and tortured. A report by the Institute for War and Peace (IWPR) also documented that religious courts now exists in Iraq allegedly to try homosexuals, sentencing them to death, and subsequently executing them under the supervision of clerics.

The aforementioned news accounts, coupled with UNAMI and IWPR's reports, present a substantial body of evidence that LGBT Iraqis have been systematically targeted for violence by Islamic clerics and militias. Yet the 2006 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, released by the State Department this March, made no reference to any human rights violations in Iraq based on sexual orientation. We thus urge the State Department to investigate such allegations and incorporate the findings in the annual human rights report.

Furthermore, we urge you to utilize every diplomatic tool available to engage Prime Minister Al-Maliki and President Talabani and call on the Iraqi government to crack down on the systematic prosecution of Iraqi homosexuals. In 2005, the Iraqi people adopted a Constitution guaranteeing that "every individual has the right to enjoy life, security and liberty," (emphasis added). Unfortunately, such promises have been particularly eroded for LGBT Iraqis, who must live in constant fear of being targeted for execution. We therefore urge you to raise this serious issue with the Iraqi leadership and press them to take immediate action to halt the killings of Iraqi homosexuals.

Sincerely,
Tammy BaldwinMember of Congress
Barney FrankMember of Congress

Gay genocide in Iraq

2007-05-30T10:22:00.000+01:00

May-2007

Murdered and set ablaze April 2006, Karar Oda is just one of the many Iraqis dragged from their homes by hooded militia and shot, set on fire or beheaded because they were believed to be gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. The grisly image is all that was left of Oda, a farmer who was seized and killed by Badr brigades – militia of the The Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council (SIIC) (Arabic: المجلس الأعلى الإسلامي العراقي) (previously known as Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI)) – because they suspected him of having an affair with another man.

These men, also believed to be gay, were gunned down a few weeks before Oda’s death in the Iraqi city of Ramadi by Shi’a fundamentalist death squads. The victims appear to be under 18. One looks as young as 14 or 15.

This week’s cover story, “Democracy’s Deaf Ear,” by Patrick Sherman, reports how Iraqi death squads and militias control large portions of Iraq and target people for what they view as “crimes against Islam.” Punishable offenses have included wearing shorts or jeans, consuming alcohol, agreeing to shave a man’s beard, dancing, listening to Western pop music, eating or serving a “sexually immoral salad,” and for women, going out in public unveiled.

Practicing homosexuality is also viewed as a crime against Islam, and potentially hundreds either caught or suspected of same-sex relations have paid with their lives.

What’s surprising is that these killings began after the U.S. and British-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, not under the Saddam regime. According to Ali Hili, founder of the London-based human rights organization Iraq LGBT, whom the Gay & Lesbian Times interviewed at length, homosexuality during Saddam’s rule didn’t garner the sort of violence being witnessed today.

“At that time, there were the sanctions and the economic crisis in Iraq. There was so much more to worry about [than] homosexuals,” he said.

Ibrahim Ebeid, co-editor of the blog al-maharer.net, who lived in Iraq for four years during the 1970s, said, “I never heard of any gay arrested or of any who was killed. The killing started after the invasion of Iraq. It’s really very sad now. If you hate someone, you just have to say, ‘He is gay,’ [whether] he is or not. They go in front of his family and they shoot them there right on the spot.”

The U.S. government is ignoring these atrocities. Perhaps they are drowned out by the volume of killings that occur almost every day in war-torn Iraq.

Openly gay Congressmember Barney Frank, D-Mass., said he was unaware of the sexual cleansing taking place before Sherman contacted him. Of all those Sherman contacted for the story, however, Frank was the only congressmember to take action, committing to write a letter to the secretaries of state and defense requesting government pressure be put on Iraq regarding the situation. He also said he would contact others in Congress to sign the letter.

How many other elected officials, with a majority voting in favor of this war, are unaware of its many consequences, we wonder?

What was sold to the American public as a mission to bring democracy to the Middle East has instead bred Islamic extremism. This gay genocide happening right under the nose of the U.S. military only adds to the long list of complete and utter failures by the Bush administration in a war billed to make the world safe from terror.

Contact your Mp’s & congressmember and help make this a international issue. to find out how you can assist Hili in saving the lives of GLBT people in Iraq.

http://www.gaylesbiantimes.com/?id=9774&issue=1012

IRAQ - MORE GAY EXECUTIONS

2007-04-03T11:43:00.000+01:00

Baghdad refuses to protect gays and denounces UN report

London – 3 April 2007

“Iraqi lesbians and gays continue to be subjected a systematic reign
of terror by Shia death squads. The government of Iraq refuses to
crack down on the killers or to take any action to protect its gay
citizens. It is a regime that is dominated by Shia fanatics and
homophobes,” according to Ali Hili, the coordinator of the human
rights group Iraqi LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender).

Mr Hili lists below a few examples of the many death squad killings of
gay Iraqis.

“Supporters of the fundamentalist Sadr and Badr militias boast that
they are cleansing Iraq of what they call ‘sexual perverts’. They are
open about terrorising gay Iraqis to make them flee the country and
murdering those who fail to leave. Their goal is a queer-free,
pro-homophobic Iraq. They are dragging our country back to the dark
ages,” said the London-based Mr Hili, who is also Middle East
spokesperson for the gay human rights group, OutRage!

“Some members of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government are
linked to the anti-gay death squads. They are the political
representatives of the Muqtada al-Sadr movement and the Supreme
Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). Both these parties
have militias, respectively the Mahdi army and the Badr brigades, who
are responsible for the execution-style killing of lesbian and gay
Iraqis – and the murder of many other Iraqis, including Sunni Muslims,
trade unionists, unveiled women, journalists and men wearing shorts,
jeans or western-style haircuts.

“The murder of gay Iraqis has the support of highly influential
religious leaders, such as Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. He issued a
fatwa in late 2005, calling for the execution of gay people in the
‘most severe way possible’. After international protests, he removed
the fatwa from his website, but the fatwa itself has not been
rescinded. It remains in force and is the spiritual sanction for the
death squads to murder gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people,”
said Mr Hili.

The United Nations Assistance Mission to Iraq (UNAMI) has corroborated
Iraqi LGBT’s claims of “sexual cleansing” by the death squads and
Islamist courts:

"Armed Islamic groups and militias have been known to be particularly
hostile towards homosexuals, frequently and openly engaging in violent
campaigns against them," January’s UNAMI report said.

"There have been a number of assassinations of homosexuals in Iraq…At
least five homosexual males were reported to have been kidnapped from
Shaab area in the first week of November (2006) by one of the main
militias. The mutilated body of Amjad, one of the kidnapped, appeared
in the same area after a few days. [We were] also alerted to the
existence of religious courts, supervised by clerics, where
homosexuals allegedly
would be 'tried,' 'sentenced' to death and then executed," UNAMI
said.

This UNAMI report provoked a hostile reaction from the government of
Iraq, which suggested that gay people are unIraqi and unIslamic:

“There was information in the report that we cannot accept here in
Iraq. The report, for example, spoke about the phenomenon of
homosexuality and giving them their rights," said Mr al-Dabbagh, a
spokesperson for the Iraqi government. "Such statements are not
suitable to the Iraqi society. This is rejected. They (the UN) should
respect the values and traditions here in Iraq.”

Iraq’s many LGBT victims of the death squads

Here are details of a few of the LGBTs who have been murdered in Iraq
in recent months:

“Anwar, aged 34, a taxi driver, was a member of Iraqi LGBT and helped
run one of the group’s safe houses in the city of Najaf. He
disappeared in January 2007. He was arrested in his taxi after being
stopped at a police and militia checkpoint. His body was found in
March 2007. He had been subjected to an execution-style killing.

“Nouri, aged 29, a tailor, was kidnapped in the city of Karbala in
February 2007. He had received many death threats by letter and phone
in the past, accusing him of leading a gay life. He was found dead a
few days later, with his body mutilated and his head severed.

“Hazim, a 21-year-old man, was taken by police officers from his house
in Baghdad in February 2007. He was well-known to be gay. After
threats because of his homosexuality, his family was forced to leave
their home. Hazim’s body was subsequently found with several shots to
the head.

“Sayf, a gay 25-year-old, worked for the Iraqi police as a translator.
He was kidnapped in the Al-Adhamya suburb by black masked men in
Ministry of Interior security force uniforms who drove a marked police
car. Almost certainly they were members of the Badr militia which has
infiltrated the Interior Ministry and police. Sayf’s body was found
several days later, with his head cut off.

“Khaldon, a 45 year old gay man lived in al-Hurriya, a mainly Shia
neighborhood of Baghdad. He worked as a chef. The Sadr militia, the
Mahdi army, kidnapped him in November 2006. His decaying corpse was
found in February 2007.

“Khalid, a 19 year old gay man, a college student who lived in
al-Kadomya, was kidnapped in December 2006. Three months later, his
family was handed his tortured and burned remains.

“Hasan Sabeh, a 34 year old transvestite - also known as Tamara -
worked in the fashion industry designing women’s clothes. He lived in
the al-Mansor district of Baghdad. Hasan was seized in the street by
an Islamist death squad and hanged in public on the holy Shia
religious day, 11 January 2007. His body was mutilated and cut to
pieces. When his brother-in-law tried to defend him, he was also
murdered.

“Four gay friends had been receiving threatening letters at their
Baghdad houses. All four were arrested on 26 December 2006 by militia
at a roadside checkpoint. They were interrogated about whether they
were Sunnis. Their identity cards showed that three of the men were
Shia. These three men were released after several hours of
interrogation. The fourth man, Samer, a 26 year old a Sunni who lived
in Zayona, was later found with gunshot wounds to his head, his eyes
blindfolded and his hands tied behind his back. His body showed marks
of torture and many burns. It is not clear whether Samer was executed
because he was Sunni or gay or both.

“Alan Thomas, was a 23 year old, Christian gay Iraqi who lived in
al-Gadeer, a Shia majority district of Baghdad. He received many
threats for being gay and was eventually kidnapped and executed by
Shia death squads in late 2006. His older sister spoke to me over the
phone from Baghdad; explaining how the murder of her only brother
caused the death of their sick elderly mother. She told me: ‘The new
Iraqi evil regime does not provide effective protection to the
population of Iraq. Shia militias act in collusion with security
force gangs to take revenge on the Sunni’s and other minorities.’

“Occasionally, some victims of the fundamentalists have been able to
buy their survival. Hamid A, a 44 year old bisexual man, from the
Al-Talibya district. He was kidnapped twice by the Sadr militia. The
first instance was in April 2006 when he, his nephew and his brother
were kidnapped and tortured. He was released in May 2006 after his
tribe members paid a huge ransom to save his life and the lives of his
relatives. Hamid was kidnapped for a second time in November 2006 by
the same Sadr militia, when an informant reported that he was drinking
alcohol and that he was suspected of being gay. He was held in a big
office in Sadr city, along with other detainees - most of them Sunnis
and Christians. Again, he was ransomed and is now in hiding; a rare
survivor of the Sadr militia interrogation centres.

“Heterosexual friends of gays are also executed. This happened to
Majid Sahi, aged 28, a civil engineer. He had been helping Iraqi LGBT
members in Baghdad. Abducted by the Badr militia from his home, they
objected to his association with gay Iraqis. His family was advised by
the Badr forces that their son’s “immoral behavior” was the reason for
his kidnapping. His body was found in Baghdad, with bullet wounds in
the back of his head, on 23 February 2007.

Photos of some of these victims are available here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/outrage/sets/72157600042494571/

NB: Sorry, we do not have high resolution versions.

“Despite the great danger involved, Iraqi LGBT has established a
clandestine network of lesbian and gay activists inside Iraq’s major
cities, including Baghdad, Najaf, Karbala, Hilla and Basra,” reports
Peter Tatchell of OutRage!, who is working closely with Ali Hili and
Iraqi LGBT.

“These heroic activists are helping gay people on the run from
fundamentalist death squads; hiding them in safe houses in Baghdad,
and helping them escape to Jordan, Syria and Lebanon,” said Mr
Tatchell.

Ali Hili is making an appeal for donations to fund the work of Iraqi
LGBT:

“Iraqi LGBT needs donations to help gay people in Iraq who are fleeing
the death squads. We need money for safe houses, food, electricity,
security protection and clothing - and to help pay the phone bills of
members of the Iraqi LGBT group. They are sending us information about
the homophobic killings, at great risk to their own lives.

“Many of the people we are helping had nothing but the clothes on
their backs, when they fled the attacks by fundamentalist militias.

“We are also paying for medication for members who are HIV positive.
Otherwise, they will not get treatment. If it is discovered that they
have HIV, they will surely be killed,” said Mr Hili.

The UK-based gay rights group OutRage! is working with Iraqi LGBT to
support its work. Iraqi LGBT is coordinated by Ali Hili from the
safety of London UK. The group does not yet have a bank account.
Operating an Iraqi LGBT bank account in Baghdad would be suicide. For
this reason, it has to operate its finances from London. All the
group’s members in London are Iraqi refugees seeking asylum. Their
lack of proper legal status makes it difficult for them to open a bank
account in the UK. This is why Iraqi LGBT is asking that cheques be
made payable to:

“OutRage!”, with a cover note marked “For Iraqi LGBT”, and sent to
OutRage!, PO Box 17816, London SW14 8WT, England, UK. OutRage! then
forwards the donations received to Ali Hili and Iraqi LGBT for wire
transfer to Baghdad.

More information:

Ali Hili 079 819 594 53

Blog: http://iraqilgbtuk.blogspot.com/

Photos of some of the LGBT victims are available here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/outrage/sets/72157600042494571/

NB: Sorry, we do not have high resolution versions.

For photos of other victims, see:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/outrage/sets/72057594087304767/

Peter Tatchell, OutRage! 020 7403 1790

END.

Iraqi Policemen go on killing spree

2007-03-28T12:43:00.000+01:00

28 March 2007

Iraqi Police and Shiite militias rampaged through a Sunni district on a revenge spree against Sunni resident in the north-western Iraqi town of Tal Afar overnight, killing more than 60 people in apparent reprisal for bombings in a Shi'ite area, Iraqi officials said on Wednesday.
The attack was on the Sunni district of al-Wahda in Tal Afar, where tensions have been rising between residents, who are a mixture of Shi'ites, Sunni Arabs and Turkmen.

The gunmen began roaming Sunni neighborhoods in the city, shooting at residents and homes, according to police and a local Sunni politician.

Ali al-Talafari, a Sunni member of the local Turkomen Front Party, said the Iraqi army had arrested 18 policemen accused of being involved after they were identified by the Sunni families targeted. But he said the attackers included Shiite militiamen.

He said more than 60 Sunnis had been killed, but a senior hospital official in Tal Afar put the death toll at 45, with four wounded.

The hospital official, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to security concerns, said the victims were men between the ages of 15 and 60, and they were killed with a shot to the back of the head.

Police said earlier dozens of Sunnis were killed or wounded, but they had no precise figures, and communications problems made it difficult to reach them for an update. The shooting continued for more than two hours, the officials said.

Army troops later moved into the Sunni areas to stop the violence and a curfew was slapped on the entire town, according to Wathiq al-Hamdani, the provincial police chief and his head of operations, Brig. Abdul-Karim al-Jibouri.

Tal Afar, located 260 miles northwest of Baghdad, is in the province of Ninevah, of which Mosul is the capital. It is a mainly Turkomen city with some 60 percent of its residents adhering to Shiite Islam and the rest mostly Sunnis.

The violence came a day after two truck bombs shattered markets in the city, killing at least 63 people and wounding dozens in the second assault in four days. After Tuesday's bombings, suspected Sunni insurgents tried to ambush ambulances carrying the injured out of the northwestern city but were driven off by police gunfire, Iraqi authorities said.

The carnage was the worst bloodshed in a surge of violence across Iraq as militants on both sides of the sectarian divide apparently have fled to other parts of the country to avoid a U.S.-Iraqi security crackdown, raising tensions outside the capital.

Meanwhile, hundreds of Iraqis detained in the U.S.-led security crackdown in Baghdad are being held in two detention centers designed to hold at most a few dozen people, The New York Times reported Wednesday, citing an Iraqi monitoring group.

The report said 705 people were packed into an area built for 75 at one of the detention centers, in the town of Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad. The other center, on Muthana Air Base, held 272 people, including two women and four boys, in a space designed to hold about 50.

Officials from the monitoring group said they did not know the sectarian composition of the detainee populations.

END

UK FAILURE TO TAKE SHARE OF RESPONSIBILITY FOR IRAQI REFUGEES

2007-02-19T17:33:00.000Z

The UK is failing to take its share of responsibility for the refugee crisis facing Iraq said Amnesty International today, ahead of the government'squarterly asylum statistics.

While the USA has agreed to take refugees from Iraq's overburdened neighbouring countries and the EU is discussing the situation of Iraqi refugees and its response to the current crisis, theUK is returning people to northern Iraq despite the ongoing insecurity.

Upto 38 Iraqis were forcibly returned from the UK to northern Iraq on Monday12 February.

In a letter to UK Home Secretary John Reid, Amnesty International iscalling on the UK to stop forced returns to Iraq immediately, and to put inplace a resettlement scheme like that announced by the USA.

The letter also highlights the plight of Iraqis at the end of the UK asylum process whocannot be returned to areas like Baghdad, who are forced intodestitution when they are denied support from the UK authorities.The USA last week announced that it would take in 7,000 refugees fromIraq under a UN-sponsored 'resettlement scheme'.

Other countries have alsoplayed their part: Sweden granted 2,330 Iraqis refugee status in 2005 aloneand other European countries such as Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland andNorway are not returning Iraqi asylum seekers.

The bulk of refugees are taken by neighbouring countries, however: Syria has received a millionIraqi refugees and Jordan over 800,000.By contrast, the latest available statistics show fewer than 600 asylumapplications to the UK from Iraqis in 2006, with the vast majority ofclaims refused.

Amnesty International UK Refugee Programme Director Jan Shaw said:"While other countries are helping Iraqi people fleeing terror andviolence, the UK is returning them to an uncertain fate - a truly shamefulsituation.

"The bloodshed in Iraq is causing people to flee for their lives andthe international community has a responsibility to offer them a safehaven.

"The UK should consider a resettlement scheme for Iraqi refugees aspart ofa responsibility-sharing approach - not turn its back on desperate andterrified people."

ENDS

Iraq death squads government sanctioned

2007-02-19T15:53:00.000Z

Iraqi government ministers collude with the killers of gays

US and UK condemned for refusing asylum to gay Iraqis

London – 19 February 2007

The leader of the gay rights group Iraqi LGBT, Ali Hili, received a standing ovation from 250 delegates when he addressed the “Faith, Homophobia and Human Rights” conference in London on Saturday 17 February 2007.

Mr Hili, a gay refugee from Iraq, is also Middle East Affairs spokesperson for the UK-based LGBT human rights group, OutRage!. He told the conference that some ministers in the US and UK-backed Iraqi government were colluding with death squads responsible for the “sexual cleansing” of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) Iraqis:

“Iraqi LGBTs are at daily risk of execution by the Shia death squads of the Badr and Sadr militias.

“Members of these militias have infiltrated the Iraqi police and are abusing their police authority to pursue a plan to eliminate all homosexuals in Iraq.

“This is happening with the collusion of key ministers in the Iraqi government.

“The Badr and Sadr militias are the armed wings of the two main Shia parties that control the government of Iraq.

“These governing parties – particularly the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq - are complicit in the widespread execution of Iraqi LGBTs.

“What is happening today in Iraq is one of the most organised and systematic sexual cleansings in the history of the world,” Mr Hili told the conference.

Referring to the abduction by death squads, and presumed murder, of five members of Iraqi LGBT in Baghdad last November, Mr Hili said:

“For the previous few months these activists had been documenting the killing of lesbians and gays, and relaying details of homophobic executions to our office in London. I have no doubt that they were targeted – not just because they were gay – but also to stop them exposing to the outside world the anti-gay pogrom that is happening in Iraq today,” he said.

Condemning the refusal of the British and US governments to grant asylum to many refugees from the homophobic and sectarian violence in Iraq, Mr Hili added:

“The West, which caused much the current chaos in Iraq, should be giving refuge to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Iraqis. Right now, the US and Britain are turning down asylum claims by Iraqi LGBTs,” he said.

The full text of Mr Hili’s speech follows below.

The “Faith, Homophobia and Human Rights” conference had the support of 52 sponsors, including the Home Office, religious organisations (gay and straight), trade unions, LGBT groups, secular campaigners and ethnic minority agencies.

Speaking after the conference, Mr Hili said:

“The aim of the conference was to build a progressive alliance between people of faith and the queer community, and to oppose the rise of religious fundamentalism – in particular, the bid by some faith groups to seek exemption from equality laws protecting LGBTs.”

Further information: Ali Hili +44 (0)79819 594 53

More info on Iraqi LGBT: http://iraqilgbtuk.blogspot.com/

The text of Ali Hili’s speech to the “Faith, Homophobia and Human Rights” conference in London on 17 February 2007.

“I speak on behalf of Iraqi LGBT – an underground network of LGBT activists that we have established inside Iraq.

Our members – and all Iraqi LGBTs - are at daily risk of execution by the Shia death squads of the Badr and Sadr militias.

Members of these militias have infiltrated the Iraqi police and are abusing their police authority to pursue a plan to eliminate all homosexuals in Iraq.

This is happening with the collusion of key ministers in the Iraqi government.

The Badr and Sadr militias are the armed wings of the two main Shia parties that control the government of Iraq.

These governing parties – particularly the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq - are complicit in the widespread execution of Iraqi LGBTs.

What is happening today in Iraq is one of the most organized and systematic sexual cleansings in the history of the world.

Attacks have escalated into unprecedented levels of homophobic violence, including targeted assassinations.

The United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq (UNAMI) has recently, for the first time, confirmed that there are organised campaigns to kill gays in Iraq. These killings are taking place on the order of Iraq’s Shia leaders.

The UNAMI Human Rights Office recently reported that it was “alerted to the existence of religious courts, supervised by clerics, where alleged homosexuals would be 'tried,' 'sentenced' to death, and then executed.”

One of the self-appointed religious judges in Sadr City believes that homosexuality is on the wane in Iraq. “Most [gays] have been killed and others have fled,” he said, insisting that the religious courts have “a lot to be proud of. We now represent a society that asked us to protect it not only from thieves but also from these [bad] deeds [same-sex relationships]."

Iraq's government strongly criticized the UNAMI report on human rights abuses; condemning it for discussing issues that are considered taboo in Iraqi society, such as homosexuality, and the systematic murder of LGBTs.

“There was information in the report that we cannot accept here in Iraq. The report, for example, spoke about the phenomenon of homosexuality and giving them their rights," said Mr al-Dabbagh (a spokesperson for the Iraqi regime). "Such statements are not suitable to the Iraqi society. This is rejected. They (the UN) should respect the values and traditions here in Iraq.”

I will give you just one example of the homophobic terror Iraqi LGBTs are facing.

Five activists in Baghdad were discovered in a safe house and abducted at gunpoint on 9 November last year. Nothing has been heard of them since then. It is feared that death squads operating within the Iraqi police may have murdered them.

The kidnapped men all were members of our group Iraqi LGBT.

For the previous few months these activists had been documenting the killing of lesbians and gays, and relaying details of homophobic executions to our office in London. I have no doubt that they were targeted – not just because they were gay – but also to stop them exposing to the outside world the anti-gay pogrom that is happening in Iraq today.

The Iranian Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who is the world leader of Shia Muslims, clearly states that gays and lesbians should be executed.

This gives direct religious sanction to the murder of LGBTs by the Badr and Sadr death squads. Sistani is giving the killers divine authority.

In spite of the world unity against the unlawful war on Iraq, the United States and its allies, including the government of the United Kingdom, chose to go ahead with the invasion of Iraq and cause the deaths of so many innocent lives.

The everyday loss of innocent lives in Iraq does not seem to matter to the western media today, especially when the victims are minorities like LGBTs.

The urgency now is to protect LGBT people in Iraq. We need action by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the Red Cross and Red Crescent, and by other international aid agencies and human right organisations.

The UNHCR is failing to support Iraqi LGBTs who have fled to Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. It should be providing them with shelter and subsistence. It should be giving them travel documents, so they can seek refuge in safe western countries. So far, this is not happening.

The West, which caused much the current chaos in Iraq, should be giving refuge to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Iraqis. Right now, the US and Britain are turning down asylum claims by Iraqi LGBTs.

We need funding to enable our activists inside Iraq to continue to document the killings, acquire more safe houses, and to assist LGBTs to escape to neighbouring countries.

We are working closely with OutRage!. Please send a donation payable to OutRage!, with a cover note stating that it is “For Iraqi LGBT”.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank Peter Tatchell and OutRage! for all the help that they have provided Iraqi LGBT so far.

Finally, we Iraqi LGBTs will not allow ourselves to exterminated liked rats. We are determined to fight for our rights in the new Iraq. With your help, we can defy the religious fundamentalists and win our place in a free and democratic nation,” said Mr Hili.

Conference Declaration:

http://www.lgcm.org.uk/fhconference/Conference_Statement.html

Conference photos and podcasts of the main speeches:

http://www.lgcm.org.uk/fhconference/gallery/gallery.html

Conference background information:

http://www.lgcm.org.uk/fhconference/

Note:

Iraqi LGBT is autonomous and independent. It is run by Iraqi refugees in the UK and Iraqi LGBTs based inside Iraq. OutRage! has assisted Iraqi LGBT with start-up funding, media contacts and banking facilities.

Iraqi LGBT is appealing for funds to help the work of their members in Iraq. They don’t yet have a bank account and have asked for donations to be forwarded via OutRage! Cheques should be made payable to “OutRage!”, with a cover note marked “For Iraqi LGBT”, and sent to OutRage!, PO Box 17816, London SW14 8WT, England UK.

More info on Iraqi LGBT: http://iraqilgbtuk.blogspot.com/

Ends

Gay Iraqis face continued persecution

2007-02-16T16:20:00.000Z

Sectarian blackmail, mutilation, and assassination of gays are rife.

16th February 2007
Alexis Hood

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) has promised to crack down on the persecution of gay people in Iraq.

The slaughter of gay Iraqis by Islamist death squads is yet another tragic consequence of the chaos and carnage in this beleaguered country.

It would seem that no-one is safe from fundamentalist militias, who target Iraqis for "crimes against Islam," which might include drinking alcohol, having a Sunni name, or not being veiled if you are a woman.

Sectarian blackmail, mutilation, and assassination of gays are rife.

In 2005, Iraq’s leading Muslim cleric, the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani issued a fatwa ordering the execution of gay Iraqis.

The followers of rebel leader Muqtada al-Sadr, too, are proving they are all too eager to murder gays.

Now pressure from gay and human rights groups has forced the FCO to tackle these attacks on gay Iraqis.

As late as May last year, a letter drafted by FCO officials was reluctant to address this problem.

"We are of course aware of reports about the activities of so-called death squads in Iraq who are allegedly targeting people whose values are different from their own," the letter read.

"This problem has mainly been centred on differences in religious belief and ethnicity, but we are aware of reports that it has now spread to include sexual orientation.

"It is difficult, however, to assess clearly the extent of this problem and how much it reflects criminality and local feuding as opposed to widespread or organised movement against any particular group or groups."

April 2006 saw more wavering from the FCO over reports of persecution of gays. In a communication, an FCO official gave their opinion that: "The position of homosexuality in Iraqi law is not clear. There is no specific law that we know of against homosexuality but there are others that could be seen to see it as illegal."

By August 2006, however, the targeting of gays in Iraq was a hot topic. The Observer ran an article: "Gays flee Iraq as Shia death squads find a new target."

People started writing to the FCO, who prepared the following statement in response:

"We are aware of reports of increasing violence and intimidation against homosexual men in Iraq.

This is in the context of a wider rise in violence against Iraqi civilians including violence against women, sectarian violence and violence against minorities.

"We condemn all violence and intimidation and are working with the Iraqi government to tackle this, including by helping strengthen the capacity of the Iraqi Security Forces. More widely, we are working to promote respect for the rule of law and human rights by and for all Iraqis.

"We raise issues of concern, such as the reports of increasing levels of violence against minorities with the Iraqi government on a regular basis."

But gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell warns that these murders are an ominous sign of things to come.

Writing in the New Humanist, he accuses some Iraqi police and government ministers of colluding in the killings, and argues that: "the execution of lesbian and gay Iraqis by Islamist death squads and militia is symptomatic of the fate that will befall all Iraqis if the fundamentalists continue to gain influence. The summary killing of queers is the canary in the mine – a warning of the barbarism to come."

Please check the link:

http://www.pinknews.co.uk/news/articles/2005-3731.html

U.N. confirms anti-gay death squads in Iraq

2007-02-02T12:18:00.000Z

by Anthony Glassman

Baghdad--The United Nations has for the first time confirmed that there are organized campaigns to kill gays in Iraq, directed by orders from Islamic leaders.

One such order says gays “should be killed in the worst, most severe way of killing.”

The United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq’s Human Rights Report for the last two months of 2006 has a section on sexual orientation, the first time it has been included in a report from the organization.

“Even though homosexuality is not condoned in Iraqi society, homosexuals are protected under Iraqi law,” the report reads. “Attacks on homosexuals and intolerance of homosexual practices have long existed, yet they have escalated in the past year.”

“The current environment of impunity and lawlessness invites a heightened level of insecurity for homosexuals in Iraq,” it continues. “Armed Islamic groups and militias have been known to be particularly hostile towards homosexuals, frequently and openly engaging in violent campaigns against them.”

Those campaigns are at the behest of Islamic leaders, including Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the spiritual leader of Shiite Muslims in Iraq.

British gay civil rights advocate Peter Tatchell issued a warning last March that such attacks were being carried out with increasing regularity. It had a link to Sistani’s website and its proscriptions against same-sex activity.

“What is the judgment for sodomy and lesbianism?” Sistani’s site asks.

“Forbidden,” comes the answer. “Punished, in fact, killed. The people involved should be killed in the worst, most severe way of killing.”

Currently, Sistani’s site says, “Question: What is the view on a man embracing another man with lust, and go about kissing one another with sexual desire? What if they go even further and enter the domain of deviant sexual behaviour? Answer: All of this is haram even if there might be difference in the degree of prohibition.”

“Haram” is that which is forbidden in Islam.

“Allegedly, three fatwas [Islamic legal pronouncements] would have been issued by Islamic clerics authorizing ‘good Muslims’ to hunt and kill homosexuals,” the U.N. report states. “[The Human Rights Office] was also alerted to the existence of religious courts, supervised by clerics, where homosexuals allegedly would be ‘tried,’ ‘sentenced’ to death and then executed.”

Both Tatchell and the UNAMI report expound on some of the attacks on LGBT Iraqis. UNAMI’s report says, “At least five homosexual males were reported to have been kidnapped from Shaab area in the first week of December by one of the main militias. Their personal documents and information contained in computers were also confiscated.”

“The mutilated body of Amjad, one of the kidnapped, appeared in the same area after a few days,” it continues.

Tatchell, meanwhile, spoke to Ali Hili, head of the Iraqi LGBT UK Abu Nawas organization, made up of expatriate queer Iraqis living in Britain. Hili is also a member of Tatchell’s group, OutRage.

“Sistani is not even Iraqi,” Hili noted. “He is an Iranian national who has set himself up as a religious leader in Iraq. He wants to impose an Iranian-style theocracy on the Iraqi people.”

In Tatchell’s report, Hili details eight people who were killed, and one who was forced into hiding, because of the militias’ crusades against LGBT people.

Activists like Hili, who said that discreet homosexuality was tolerated under Saddam Hussein’s rule, noted that the power vacuum in the country is contributing to the violence. He is doubtful that President Bush’s plan to increase the number of troops will help the gay community.

The New Iraqi regime slams U.N. report on casualties

2007-01-18T17:11:00.000Z

By BASSEM MROUEASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Iraq's government on Thursday strongly criticized a U.N. report on human rights that put its civilian death toll in 2006 at 34,452, saying it is "superficial" and discussed subjects that are taboo in Iraqi society such as homosexuality.

The government did not reject the casualty figure but said the U.N. Assistance Mission report was "not professional or neutral as we would expect from the missions of the international organization. The report was superficial in dealing with several points," spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said.

A compilation of Iraqi government figures from three agencies put the number of civilians killed last year at some 12,357.

But a Health Ministry official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to disclose the information, said 16,000 bodies of victims of violence had been brought to the Baghdad morgue alone last year and it appeared that the U.N. figure was "about correct."

When asked what the government didn't accept about the report, al-Dabbagh said "I am not talking about figures. I am talking about details in the report."
The U.N. report, which was released Tuesday in Baghdad, also was critical about the government's performance on human rights violations, raising concerns about homosexuals and other vulnerable groups.

"The current environment of impunity and lawlessness invites a heightened level of insecurity for homosexuals in Iraq. Armed Islamic groups and militias have been known to be particularly hostile toward homosexuals frequently and openly engaging in violent campaigns against them," the U.N. report read. "There has been a number of assassinations of homosexuals in Iraq."

Such a topic is widely frowned at in this predominantly Muslim country and gays usually keep their sexual orientation a secret.

"There was information in the report that we cannot accept here in Iraq. The report, for example, spoke about the phenomenon of homosexuality and giving them their rights," al-Dabbagh said. "Such statements are not suitable to the Iraqi society. This is rejected."
"They should respect the values and traditions here in Iraq," he said.

He said that the government is doing its best to guarantee the respect of human rights in the country "despite the difficult situation Iraqi is going though."

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1107AP_Iraq_UN.html

Sexual cleansing in Iraq

2007-01-11T11:41:00.000Z

Peter Tatchell reveals that Islamist death squads are targeting gays and lesbians

New Humanist – January/February 2007

Confronted as we are by a daily catalogue of horror stories from Iraq, it is easy to overlook the specific nature of some of the terror campaigns being conducted against its inhabitants.

Perhaps none has been so overlooked as the systematic ‘sexual cleansing’ operations currently being mounted by Islamist death squads, many of whom have infiltrated the Iraqi police. They relentlessly targets gays and lesbians for extra-judicial execution as part of an explicit crusade of moral purification.

Consider the fate of five gay men: Amjad (27), Rafid (29), Hassan (24), Ayman (19) and Ali (21). They were members of Iraq’s clandestine gay rights movement, Iraqi LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender). For many months they had been documenting the killing of lesbians and gays, relaying details of the barbaric homophobic murders to the outside world, and providing safe houses and support to queers fleeing the death squads.

Last November they held a secret meeting in a safe house in the al-Shaab district of Baghdad. During the course of the meeting they were in communication with the founder and head of Iraqi LGBT, Ali Hili, who operates from London, UK. “Suddenly there was a lot of noise, then the connection ended,” recalls Mr Hili.

We now know that the meeting was interrupted by the arrival of Iraqi police who seized all five men at gunpoint. Nothing has been heard of them since.

Moral purification is not confined to gay men. In June last year, lslamist death squads burst into the home of two lesbians in city of Najaf. They shot them dead, slashed their throats, and also murdered a young child the lesbians had rescued from the sex trade. The two women, both in their mid-30s, were members of Iraqi LGBT. They were providing a safe house for gay men on the run from death squads. By sheer luck, none of the men who were being given shelter in the house were at home when the assassins struck. They have now fled to Baghdad and are hiding in an Iraqi LGBT safe house in the suburbs.

These latest horrific homophobic kidnappings and murders are a snapshot of the rapidly growing power and menace of Iraq’s death squads, many of which belong to militias that are hell-bent on turning the country into a fundamentalist Islamic state. Some operate within the police and others independently. All owe their allegiance to firebrand, militant Shia clerics.

Large parts of Iraq, including many Baghdad neighbourhoods, are now under the de facto control of these fundamentalist militias and their death squad units. They enforce a harsh interpretation of Sharia law, summarily executing people for what they denounce as “crimes against Islam.” These “crimes” include listening to western pop music, wearing shorts or jeans, drinking alcohol, selling videos, working in a barber’s shop, homosexuality, dancing, having a Sunni name, adultery and, in the case of women, not being veiled or walking in the street unaccompanied by a male relative.

Two Shia militias are doing most of the killing. They are the armed wings of major parties in the Bush and Blair-backed Iraqi government. Madhi is the militia of Muqtada al-Sadr, and Badr is the militia of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), which is the leading political force in Baghdad’s government coalition. Both militias want to establish an Iranian-style religious dictatorship – or worse.

Some of the anti-war left in Britain and the US support Muqtada al-Sadr, despite his goal of clerical fascism and his militia’s involvement in death squad killings. They hail him as a national resistance hero for fighting the US and UK occupation of Iraq; totally ignoring his militia’s sectarian murder of innocent Sunni Muslims, women and gay people. The allied occupation of Iraq is bad enough. But victory for the Madhi or Badr militias would result in a reign of religious terror many times worse.

The execution of lesbian and gay Iraqis by Islamist death squads and militias is symptomatic of the fate that will befall all Iraqis if the fundamentalists continue to gain influence. The summary killing of queers is the canary in the mine – a warning of the barbarism to come.

Lesbian and gay Iraqis cannot seek the protection of the police. Iraq’s security forces have been infiltrated by fundamentalists, especially the Badr militia. They have huge influence in the Interior Ministry and the police, and can kill at will and with impunity. Pro-fundamentalist government ministers are turning a blind eye to the killings, and helping to protect the killers.

Likewise, the Iraqi government and police are doing nothing to rescue the hundreds of young boys who have been blackmailed into the sex industry. The sex-ring operators lure the boys into having gay sex, photograph them and then threaten to publish their photos unless they work as male prostitutes. If their gayness were publicly revealed, the boys would be executed by the Islamist militias. They are trapped.

Saddam was a bloody tyrant. But while he was in power discrete homosexuality was usually tolerated. There was certainly no danger of gay people being assassinated in the street by religious fanatics. Since his overthrow, the violent persecution of lesbians and gays is commonplace. It is actively encouraged by Iraq’s leading Muslim cleric, the British and US-backed Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. In late 2005, he issued a fatwa ordering the execution of gay Iraqis. His followers in the Islamist militias are now systematically assassinating lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.

The UK-based LGBT human rights group OutRage! is working to support our counterpart organisation in Baghdad, Iraqi LGBT. Despite the great danger involved, Iraqi LGBT has established a clandestine network of gay activists inside Iraq’s major cities, including Baghdad, Najaf, Karbala, Hilla and Basra. These courageous activists are helping gay people on the run from fundamentalist death squads; hiding them in safe houses in Baghdad; and helping them escape to Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. The world ignores the fate of LGBT Iraqis at its peril. Their fate today is the fate of all Iraqis tomorrow.

* Iraqi LGBT is appealing for funds to help the work of their members in Iraq. They don’t yet have a bank account. The UK gay rights group OutRage! is helping them. Cheques should be made payable to “OutRage!”, with a cover note marked “For Iraqi LGBT”, and sent to OutRage!, PO Box 17816, London SW14 8WT.

More info on Iraqi LGBT: http://iraqilgbtuk.blogspot.com/

The victims of Islamist terror

Fourteen-year-old Ahmed Khalil was accused of corrupting the community because he had sex with men. According to his Baghdad neighbour, in April 2006 four men in police uniforms arrived at Ahmed’s house in a four-wheel-drive police pick-up truck. They wore the distinctive facemasks of the Badr militia. The neighbour saw the police drag Ahmed out of the house and shoot him at point-blank range, pumping two bullets into his head and several more bullets into the rest of his body.

Wathiq, aged 29, a gay architect, was kidnapped in Baghdad last March. Soon afterwards, the Badr militia sent his parents death threats, accusing them of allowing their son to lead a gay life and demanding a £11,000 ransom. The parents paid the money, thinking it would save Wathiq’s life. But he was found dead a few days later, with his body mutilated and his head cut off.

Wissam Auda was a member of Iraq’s Olympic tennis team. His dream was to play in the Wimbledon championship in London this year. He had been receiving death threats from religious fanatics on account of his homosexuality. On 25 May 2006, his vehicle was ambushed by fundamentalist militias in the al-Saidiya district of Baghdad. Wissam, together with his coach Hussein Ahmed Rashid and teammate Nasser Ali Hatem, were all summarily executed in the street. Their crime? Wissam’s homosexuality was probably what drew him to the attention of the militia’s, but his official crime was: wearing shorts. An Iraqi National Guard checkpoint was about 100m from the site of the ambush, but the soldiers did nothing, according to eye-witnesses.

The father of 23-year-old Baghdad arts student, Karzan, has been told by militias that his son has been sentenced to death for being gay. If his father refuses to hand over Karzan for execution, the militia has threatened to kill the family one by one. This has already happened to Bashar, 34, an actor. Because his parents refuse to reveal his hiding place, the Badr militia murdered two of his family members in retribution.

Nyaz is a 28-year old dentist who lives in Baghdad. She is terrified that her lesbian relationship will be discovered, and that both she and her partner will be killed. They have stopped seeing each other. It is too dangerous. To make matters worse, Nyaz is being forced by the fundamentalist Mahdi militia to marry an older, senior Mullah with close ties the Mahdi leader, Muqtada al-Sadr. If she does not agree to the marriage, or tries to run away, Nyaz and her family will be targeted for ‘honour killing’ by Sadr’s men.

Five gay activists kidnapped in Baghdad

2006-12-01T10:29:00.000Z

Gay fashion store owner disappears

Two lesbians and child murdered in Najaf

Four barbers abducted from shop popular with gays

Fundamentalist death squads target queers

London and Baghdad – 6 December 2006

Five gay activists were abducted at gun-point by Iraqi police inBaghdad on 9 November. Nothing has been heard of them since then. Itis feared they may have been murdered by death squads operating underthe cover of the Iraqi police.

The kidnapped men are Amjad 27, Rafid 29, Hassan 24, Ayman 19 and Ali21. All were members of Iraq’s clandestine gay rights movement, IraqiLGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender).

“For the last few months they had been documenting the killing oflesbians and gays, relaying details of homophobic executions to ouroffice in London, and providing safe houses and support to queersfleeing the death squads,” said Ali Hili, a gay Iraqi Muslim who ishead of Iraqi LGBT and Middle East spokesperson for the British gayhuman rights group OutRage!

At the time of the police raid, the five men were holding a secretmeeting in a safe house in the al-Shaab district of Baghdad. They werecommunicating with Mr Hili.

“Suddenly there was a lot of noise, then the connection ended,”recalls Mr Hili.

Just days after these five activists were abducted, Haydar Kamel, aged35, the owner of famous men’s clothing shop in the al-Karada districtof Baghdad, was kidnapped near his home in Sadr city. The kidnapperswere members of the Mahdi army, an Islamist militia loyal tofundamentalist leader Muqtada al-Sadr.

“Haydar had previously received death threats because of rumours abouthis alleged homosexuality. For many months, he had financiallysupported several men who were in hiding after they had beenthreatened by death squads because of claims that they were gay,” saidMr Hili.

Another recent raid was on the Jar al-Qamar barber shop in theal-Karada district of Baghdad. It was popular with gay men, which isprobably the reason it was targeted. All four employees were arrestedand taken away by the Iraqi police. They have disappeared.

It is feared that these 10 kidnapped men have been summarilyexecuted.

“These disappearances are the latest ‘sexual cleansing’ operationsmounted by extremist Islamist death squads, many of whom haveinfiltrated the Iraqi police,” notes Mr Hili. He has obtained detailsof the kidnappings direct by phone and email from his undergroundIraqi LGBT activist colleagues in Baghdad.

“They are systematically targeting gays and lesbians forextra-judicial execution, as part of their so-called moralpurification campaign. The aim of the death squads is the creation ofa fundamentalist state, along the lines of the religious dictatorshipin Iran,” said Mr Hili.

Earlier, in June this year, extreme lslamist death squads burst intothe home of two lesbians in the city of Najaf. They shot them dead,slashed their throats, and also murdered a young child the lesbianshad rescued from the sex trade.

The two women, both in their mid-30s, were members of Iraqi LGBT. Theywere providing a safe house for gay men on the run from death squads.By sheer luck, none of the men being given shelter in the house wereat home when the assassins struck. They have now fled to Baghdad andare hiding in an Iraqi LGBT safe house in the suburbs.

“These homophobic kidnappings and murders are a snapshot of therapidly growing power and menace of fundamentalist death squads,”added Mr Hili.

“Gays are not their only targets. They enforce a harsh interpretationof Sharia law, summarily executing people for listening to western popmusic, wearing shorts or jeans, drinking alcohol, selling videos,working in a barber’s shop, homosexuality, dancing, having a Sunniname, adultery and, in the case of women, not being veiled or walkingin the street unaccompanied by a male relative.

“Two militias are doing most of the killing. They are the armed wingsof parties in the Bush and Blair-backed Iraqi government. Badr is themilitia of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI),which is the leading political force in Baghdad’s governmentcoalition. Madhi is the militia of Muqtada al-Sadr.

“Both militias want to establish an Iranian-style clerical tyranny.They have a perverted, corrupt and violent misinterpretation ofIslam.

“The allied occupation of Iraq is bad enough. But victory for theMadhi or Badr militias would result in a reign of religious terrormany times worse.

“The execution of lesbian and gay Iraqis by extreme Islamist deathsquads and militias is symptomatic of the fate that will befall allIraqis if the fundamentalists continue to gain influence. The summaryexecution of queers is a warning of the barbarism to come.

“Saddam Hussein was a tyrant. It is good that he is no longer inpower. I don’t want him back. But under Saddam discrete homosexualitywas usually tolerated. There was no danger of gay people beingassassinated in the street by religious fanatics.

“Since Saddam’s overthrow, the violent persecution of lesbians andgays is commonplace. It is actively encouraged by Iraq’s leadingMuslim cleric, the British and US-backed Grand Ayatollah Alial-Sistani. In late 2005, he issued a fatwa ordering the execution ofgay Iraqis. His followers in the extreme Islamist militias are nowsystematically assassinating lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgenderpeople,” said Mr Hili.

“Despite the great danger involved, Iraqi LGBT has established aclandestine network of gay activists inside Iraq’s major cities,including Baghdad, Najaf, Karbala, Hilla and Basra,” said PeterTatchell of the UK-based LGBT rights group OutRage!, which is workingwith Iraqi LGBT.
“These courageous activists are helping gay people on the run fromfundamentalist death squads; hiding them in safe houses in Baghdad,and helping them escape to Syria, Jordan and Lebanon.

“The world ignores the fate of gay Iraqis at its peril. Their fatetoday is the fate of all Iraqis tomorrow,” said Mr Tatchell.

* Iraqi LGBT is appealing for funds to help the work of their membersin Iraq. They don’t yet have a bank account. The UK gay rights groupOutRage! is helping them. Cheques should be made payable to“OutRage!”, with a cover note marked “For Iraqi LGBT”, and sent toOutRage!, PO Box 17816, London SW14 8WT, England, UK.
More information:
Ali Hili – 079819 594 53
Web:

http://iraqilgbtuk.blogspot.com/

Iraqi LGBT needs funds to help its work in Iraq. It doesn’t yet have a bank account. Cheques should be made payable to Outrage, with a cover note marked “For Iraqi LGBT”, and sent to Outrage, PO Box 17816, London. SW14 8WT.

BAGHDAD GAYS FEAR FOR THEIR LIVES.

2006-11-05T15:14:00.000Z

Homosexuals across the capital are being hunted down and murdered byIslamic militants and even the police.

Wednesday, November 01, 2006Basim al-Shara'a

Faris Thamir carefully watches the street in his Al-Batawinneighbourhood, afraid the police or militia men might try to kill him.

In Iraq, where religious radicals consider homosexuality a sinpunishable by death, gays have good reason to worry about being"outed".

Thamir, 35, is wary of the extremist Islamic groups that prowl thestreets of the capital - but neither does he trust the police who aresupposedly there to protect him.

Thamir and other gay men complain about frequent mistreatment bypolice, accusing them of blackmail, torture, sexual abuse and theft."Policemen raped me several times at gunpoint and threatened to handme over to extremist groups if I refuse," said Thamir.

Concern about the involvement of policemen in criminal acts have alsobeen raised by western officials and Sunni Arab leaders who say theShia-controlled interior ministry has been infiltrated by Shiamilitias, like the Badr Brigades, who allegedly use their uniforms ascover to kidnap, torture and murder.

Earlier this month, the head of 8th National Police Brigade, one ofBaghdad's frontline police units, was detained on suspicion ofinvolvement with sectarian death squads. Several thousand policemenhave been dismissed and face prosecution for criminal acts.

Thamir does not count on any official help anymore. After spending amonth in prison - during which he said he was tortured and beaten -police continued to pursue him. So he hid at a friend's house - andonly dares to go out twice a month, disguised as a woman.

For him, the Saddam era seems like a "golden" time becausehomosexuality was discreetly tolerated. "Now I am desperate because Iexpect either to be shot or beheaded at any moment," he said.

The legal situation for gays in Iraq today remains vague. According toresearch by Sِdertِrn University in Stockholm, it is unclear to datewhether a new law on the family, approved by the Interim GoverningCouncil in December 2003, prohibits homosexual activities.

Under Islamic law, homosexual practise is a crime that carries thedeath sentence. Article two of the Iraqi constitution approved byreferendum in December 2005 refers to Islam as being "the officialreligion of the state and a basic source of legislation" . But theextent to which state laws upholds Sharia is still under dispute.

Meanwhile, the witch-hunt against the country's gays has apparentlyreceived a blessing from one of the highest religious authorities inIraq, Ayatollah Ali Sistani.

According to the London-based gay human rights group OutRage!, awebsite linked to Sistani in the Iranian city of Qom posted a fatwaagainst gays in October 2005. "The people involved [in homosexuality]should be killed in the worst, most severe way," it said. Although thetext was removed from the website in May 2006, the fatwa has not beenofficially revoked.

Inhabitants of the Baghdadi neighbourhoods of Al-Amiriya andAl-Jamia'a speak of how extremist groups have killed gays in thestreet and also targeted their relatives.

Outrage! reports of cases where members of a family have been killedfor refusing to hand over a gay male relative to the militia.

From his house in the western neighbourhood of Al-Jamia'a, MukhtarSalah, 40, a former member of Saddam's security forces, said hewitnessed gunmen kill a young man, who he later heard is alleged tohave had an affair with an American soldier.

After killing him, the militants ordered people to go home andthreatened to behead anyone who tried to claim the body. "[It] wasleft in the street for two days," said Salah, until eventually it waspicked up by a National Guard patrol.

In Saddam's time, you risked being imprisoned for being gay - buthomosexual practices were nonetheless common in religiousneighbourhoods where young unmarried men would not dare to have anycontact with women.

Nail Mohammed, 25, considers his being gay just one risk among manyothers. In the Al-Fadhil neighbourhood where he lives, extremistIslamic groups kill gay men, but also people who wear jeans or drinkalcohol. In the past six months, he said three of his closest friendshave been killed for drinking.

Bilal Arif, 40, a Baghdad lawyer, feels Iraqi society is going frombad to worse: open and secular from the 1950s to the 1970s, it turnedinto a military dictatorship under Saddam and is now moving towardsreligious extremism, he says.

Arif doubts that homosexuals are being systematically targeted.Rather, he suspects they are the victims of "the mess all over Iraq"which allows people to take the law into their own hands. "They arekilled because there is no state to hold the murderers responsible orpursue them judicially," he said.

Paradoxically, those who kill gays believe they are acting within thelaw as the Sharia, which they adhere to, deems homosexuality a crimepunishable by death.
In so-called religious courts, supervised by clerics, with no officialauthority, gays are tried, sentenced to death and then executed bymilitiamen.

Such courts were first established by Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, fatherof Muqtada al-Sadr, in 1999 in secret to adjudicate on Islamic issues.Now they are present in many predominantly Shia towns like Ammara,Basra, Ramadi and in several Shia neighbourhoods in Baghdad such asShu´la, Hurria and Sadr City.

Due to the absence of the state in large areas of the country, theseillegitimate courts have gained more and more popular support.

The trials, presided over by young inexperienced clerics, are held inHusseiniyas (Shia mosques), offices of the Sadr movement or,particularly in Shu'la and Sadr City, in ordinary halls. Gays andrapists face anything from 40 lashes to the death penalty.

Mohammed al-Saidi, one of the self-appointed judges in Sadr City,believes that homosexuality is on the wane in Iraq. "Most [gays] havebeen killed and others have fled," he said. Indeed, the number who'vesought asylum in the UK has risen noticeably over the last few months.

Saidi insists the religious courts have a lot to be proud of, "We nowrepresent a society that asked us to protect it not only from thievesand terrorists but also from these [bad] deeds."
Basim al-Shara'a is an IWPR contributor in Baghdad.

(The names of people featured in this piece have been changed forsecurity reasons)
Copyright (c) 2006 Spero

Iraq torture 'worse after Saddam'

2006-09-21T18:17:00.000+01:00

Torture may be worse now in Iraq than under former leader Saddam Hussein, the UN's chief anti-torture expert says.

Manfred Nowak said the situation in Iraq was "out of control", with abuses being committed by security forces, militia groups and anti-US insurgents.

Bodies found in the Baghdad morgue "often bear signs of severe torture", said the human rights office of the UN Assistance Mission in Iraq in a report.

The wounds confirmed reports given by refugees from Iraq, Mr Nowak said.

He told journalists at a briefing in Geneva that he had yet to visit Iraq, but he was able to base his information on autopsies and interviews with Iraqis in neighbouring Jordan.

"What most people tell you is that the situation as far as torture is concerned now in Iraq is totally out of hand," the Austrian law professor said.

"The situation is so bad many people say it is worse than it has been in the times of Saddam Hussein," he added.

Brutal methods

The UN report says detainees' bodies often show signs of beating using electrical cables, wounds in heads and genitals, broken legs and hands, electric and cigarette burns.

Bodies found at the Baghdad mortuary "often bear signs of severe torture including acid-induced injuries and burns caused by chemical substances".

Many bodies have missing skin, broken bones, back, hands and legs, missing eyes, missing teeth and wounds caused by power drills or nails, the UN report says.

Victims come from prisons run by US-led multinational forces as well as by the ministries of interior and defence and private militias, the report said.

The most brutal torture methods were employed by private militias, Mr Nowak told journalists.

The report also says the frequency of sectarian bloodletting means bodies are often found which "bear signs indicating that the victims have been brutally tortured before their extra-judicial execution".

It concludes that torture threatens "the very fabric of the country" as victims exact their own revenge and fuel further violence.

Mr Nowak said he would like to visit Iraq in person, but the current situation would not allow him to prepare an accurate report, because it would not be safe to leave Baghdad's heavily guarded Green Zone where the Iraqi government and US leadership are situated.

Gay Iraqi victims of the police and death squads

2006-08-31T11:12:00.000+01:00

Gays flee Iraq as Shia death squads find a new target

2006-08-06T15:33:00.000+01:00

Evidence shows increase in number of executions as homosexuals plead for asylum in Britain

Jennifer CopestakeSunday August 6, 2006The Observer

Hardline Islamic insurgent groups in Iraq are targeting a new type of victim with the full protection of Iraqi law, The Observer can reveal. The country is seeing a sudden escalation of brutal attacks on what are being called the 'immorals' - homosexual men and children as young as 11 who have been forced into same-sex prostitution.

There is growing evidence that Shia militias have been killing men suspected of being gay and children who have been sold to criminal gangs to be sexually abused. The threat has led to a rapid increase in the numbers of Iraqi homosexuals now seeking asylum in the UK because it has become impossible for them to live safely in their own country.

Ali Hili runs the Iraqi LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) group out of London. He used to have 40 volunteers in Iraq but says after recent raids by militia in Najaf, Karbala and Basra he has lost contact with half of them. They move to different safe houses to protect their identities, but their work is incredibly dangerous.

Eleven-year-old Ameer Hasoon al-Hasani was kidnapped by policemen from the front of his house last month. He was known in his district to have been forced into prostitution. His father Hassan told me he searched for his son for three days after his abduction, then found him, shot in the head. A copy of the death certificate confirms the cause of death.

Homosexuality is seen as so immoral that it qualifies as an 'honour killing' to murder someone who is gay - and the perpetrator can escape punishment. Section 111 of Iraq's penal code lays out protections for murder when people are acting against Islam.

'The government will do nothing to tackle this issue. It's really desperate when people get to the stage they're trading their children for money. They have no alternatives because there are no jobs,' Hili says.

Graphic photos obtained from Baghdad sources too frightened to identify themselves as having known a gay man, and seen by the Observer, show other gay Iraqis who have been executed. One shows two men, suspected of having a relationship, blindfolded with their hands tied behind their backs - guns at the ready behind their heads - awaiting execution. Another picture captured on a mobile phone shows a gay man being beaten to death. Yet another shows a corpse being dragged through the streets after his execution.

One photograph is of the mutilated, burnt body of 38-year-old Karar Oda from Sadr City. He was kidnapped by the Badr Brigade in mid-June. They work with the Ministry of Interior and are the informal armed wing of the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq, who make up the largest Shia bloc in the Iraq parliament. Oda's family were given an arrest warrant signed by the Ministry of Interior which said their son deserved to be arrested and killed for immorality as a homosexual. His body was found ten days later.

Dr Haider Jaber is currently seeking asylum in the UK after fleeing Iraq in 2004. He says the abuse started to escalate in his neighbourhood after the invasion. One night, walking home from work, he was surrounded by five men, who told him he had to become a heterosexual Muslim. He says they abused him for wearing jeans and a T-shirt with English writing, and told him he should adopt traditional robes. As a crowd gathered to watch, he was then beaten and kicked to the ground.

The threats continued. Armed militiamen broke into his family home and then his workplace looking for him. Jaber finally left the country in April. His partner, Ali. was not so lucky. Jaber learned of his Ali's murder a few days after leaving Iraq. 'They didn't send the body to the family to have a grave or a flower garden. They said he didn't deserve it because he was an animal,' he said.

Ibaa Alawi has also fled Iraq. A former employee at the British embassy in Baghdad, Alawi met Tony Blair on one of his surprise visits to Iraq. He said Blair was concerned about the safety of the Iraqis working there and praised their bravery. 'Tony Blair said the British government was thankful for our efforts and knew we were putting our lives at risk working for the British embassy in Baghdad.'

Alawi is upset the same government is not willing to help him out. He believes the Home Office will refuse him asylum because it would have to face up to the level of chaos in Iraq, and how much influence is being waged by radical Islamists - and face the fact that, for some, there is still no freedom in Iraq.

The immediate urgent priority is to Support and Donate Money to LGBT activists in Iraq in order to assist their efforts to communicate information about the wave of homophobic murders in Iraq to the outside world.

Funds raised will also help provide LGBTs under threat of honour killing with refuge in the safer parts of Iraq (including safe houses and food), and assist efforts help them seek asylum abroad.

Iraqi LGBT UK do not yet have bank account. We are working closely with the LGBT human rights group OutRage! in London.

Donations to help Iraqi LGBT in the UK and in Iraq should be made payable to "OutRage!",with a cover note marked "For Iraqi LGBT", and sent to :OutRage!, PO Box17816, London SW14 8WT, England, UK

U.S. military acknowledges Iraq anti-gay killings

2006-06-08T08:46:00.000+01:00

Exiled leader claims troops involved in Baghdad gay harassment

By LOU CHIBBARO JR. 7 Jun 2006

The U.S. military is aware of a rash of anti-gay killings in Iraq during the past eight months and is taking steps to curtail sectarian violence against all Iraqis, including gays, according to a spokesperson for the U.S.-led multinational forces in Iraq.

At least three men suspected of being gay were gunned down March 20 in the Iraqi city of Ramadi. U.S. forces say they are concerned about the rising number of anti-gay killings in Iraq. (Photo by Bilal Hussein/AP)
"If someone is in danger of being slaughtered or persecuted, we do all we can to stop it," said Army Maj. Joseph Todd Breasseale, chief of the Media Relations Division of the Multinational Corps in Iraq.

Breasseale spoke by telephone from his office at U.S. military headquarters in a section of Baghdad known as the Green Zone.

Faced with a highly volatile atmosphere brought about by warring Islamic factions, the U.S. and its coalition allies must use caution in addressing the issue of homosexuality, Breasseale said.

"It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, when we're in a fledgling time like this, to go in and say, 'Here's these issues that are going to repel 80 percent of the population and this is what we want to inflict on you,'" he said. "We're trying not to get into too many values judgment type issues and just do the right thing."

Breasseale's comments came in response to questions about how the U.S. was responding to a decision last October by a powerful Islamic leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, to issue a fatwa calling for the killing of gays in Iraq. Bush administration officials have cited al-Sistani as a moderate voice among Iraqi Shiites.

Islam considers homosexuality sinful. A website published in the Iranian city of Qom in the name of Sistani, says: "Those who commit sodomy must be killed in the harshest way," according to BBC news reports. The statement appeared in an Arabic section of the website dealing with questions of morality, but not in the English-language equivalent.

A network of gay Iraqi exiles in Europe reported that the fatwa triggered a flurry of assassinations, kidnappings and death threats against Iraqi gays.

Ali Hili, founder and spokesperson for the exile group LGBT Iraqis U.K., said Islamic death squads came to life in response to Sistani's fatwa and brought about an atmosphere of terror among gays. He said some death squad members arranged meetings with gays through chat rooms by posing as gays themselves, then captured and sometimes assaulted or killed their targeted victims.

A call for action

International human rights groups, including the U.S.-based International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission, complained that the U.S. and its coalition partners in Iraq did not appear to be taking any action to stop the anti-gay killings.

In a May 11 letter to IGLHRC executive director Paula Ettelbrick, a State Department official said the American government was troubled over reports of violence against gays in Iraq and said the U.S. embassy in Baghdad would meet with gay rights groups to address the problem.

The letter came in response to a letter from IGLHRC calling on the State Department to speak out against the anti-gay killings in Iraq.

Breasseale's comments mark the first time a U.S. military spokesperson in Iraq has publicly discussed the anti-gay killings there.

"The problem is it's such a widespread [and] concerted effort of violence against so many disparate groups and organizations," Breasseale said. "It's essentially anyone who runs afoul of anyone who has a mind to do it winds up getting killed. So we're very much aware of it, and we take both the murders and the political assassinations very seriously.

"When it's possible, we work to investigate and try to track down who did it. But as you can imagine, it's a massive, massive concerted effort we're up against."

Claims of anti-gay abuse by U.S. military denied

Breasseale's telephone interview comes shortly after American military authorities disclosed they were investigating allegations that a Marine Corps unit intentionally shot and killed 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha, a rural farming town in the Upper Euphrates Valley.

Hili, the head of the gay Iraqi exile group in London, alleged that in two cases, U.S. soldiers verbally abused and, in one case, assaulted gay Iraqis during routine searches of houses in Baghdad. In yet another incident, Hili said he learned through contacts in Iraq that a gay Iraqi was killed by one of the death squads after U.S. officials refused his request to gain access to the Green Zone for protection.

"We try to attack these issues as they come up, and all accusations of misbehavior that is attributed to bigotry are taken very seriously," Breasseale said in discussing Hili's reports of abuse against gay Iraqis by U.S. soldiers.

Breasseale called on Hili to provide more details about the incidents, such as dates, locations, and descriptions of the soldiers involved.

"All I can do at this point is reassure your readers that these allegations are taken very seriously, and that our soldiers — the vast 99.9 percent of them — do their jobs with honor and integrity day in and day out in what is easily one of the world's most grueling situations," Breasseale said. "And I can assure your readers that when allegations pan out, service members and their leadership are held accountable," he said.

http://www.washblade.com/thelatest/thelatest.cfm?blog_id=7336

The immediate urgent priority is to Support and Donate Money to LGBT activists in Iraq in order to assist their efforts to communicate information about the wave of homophobic murders in Iraq to the outside world.

Funds raised will also help provide LGBTs under threat of honour killing with refuge in the safer parts of Iraq (including safe houses and food), and assist efforts help them seek asylum abroad.

Iraqi LGBT UK do not yet have bank account. We are working closely with the LGBT human rights group OutRage! in London.

Donations to help Iraqi LGBT in the UK and in Iraq should be made payable to "OutRage!",with a cover note marked "For Iraqi LGBT", and sent to :OutRage!, PO Box17816, London SW14 8WT, England, UK

Queer Iraqis are finding life is now worse than it was under Saddam

2006-06-06T05:58:00.000+01:00

Ali Hili of Iraqi LGBT and OutRage! reveals the systematic murder of gay people by Shia fundamentalist death squads

Pink Paper – London 1 June 2006

Saddam Hussein was a tyrant. But discrete homosexuality was usually tolerated. Since Saddam’s overthrow, however, Islamist fundamentalists are growing in strength and influence. They want to establish an Iranian-style religious dictatorship. Three leading ayatollahs - Sistani, Baghdadi and Khoei – have recently issued fatwas ordering the execution of gay Iraqis. Their followers in the Badr Islamist militia are now targeting lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people for execution.

The father of 23 year old Baghdad arts student, Karzan, has been told by militias that his son has been sentenced to death for being gay. If his father refuses to hand over Karzan for execution, the militia has threatened to kill the family one by one. This has already happened to Bashar, 34, an actor. Because his parents refuse to reveal his hiding place, the Badr fanatics have murdered of his two family members in retribution.

Nyaz is a 28-year old dentist who lives in Baghdad. She is terrified that her lesbian relationship will be discovered, and that both she and her partner will be killed. They have stopped seeing each other. It is too dangerous. To make matters worse, Nyaz is being forced by the fundamentalist al-Mahdi militia to marry an older, senior Mullah with close ties the militia leader, Muqtada al-Sadr. If she does not agree to the marriage, or tries to run away, Nyaz and her family will be targeted for ‘honour killing.’

Gay Iraqis cannot seek the protection of the police. The security forces have been infiltrated by fundamentalist militants. Fourteen year old Ahmed Khalil was accused of corrupting the community because he had sex with men. According to his Baghdad neighbour, in April four men in police uniforms arrived at Ahmed’s house in a four-wheel-drive police pick-up truck. They wore the distinctive face masks of the Badr militia. The neighbour saw the police drag Ahmed out of the house and shoot him at point-blank range, pumping two bullets into his head and several more bullets into the rest of his body.

In the chaos and lawlessness of post-war Iraq, hundreds of young boys are being blackmailed into the sex industry. The sex ring operators lure the boys into having gay sex, photograph them and then threaten to publish their photos unless they work as male prostitutes. If their gayness was publicly revealed, the boys would be executed by death squads. They are trapped.

Wathiq, aged 29, a gay architect, was kidnapped in Baghdad in March. Soon afterwards, the Badr militia sent his parents death threats, accusing them of allowing their son to lead a gay life and demanding a £11,000 ransom. The parents paid the money, thinking it would save Wathiq’s life. But he was found dead a few days later, with his body mutilated and his head cut off.

Despite the great danger involved, Iraqi LGBT has established a clandestine network of gay activists inside Iraq’s major cities, including Baghdad, Najaf, Karbala, Hilla and Basra. These activists are helping gay people on the run from fundamentalist death squads; hiding them in safe houses in Baghdad, and helping them escape to Syria and Lebanon. For gay Iraqis, gay rights is literally a life and death issue. We need your help.

* Iraqi LGBT is appealing for funds to help the work of our members in Iraq. We don’t yet have a bank account. OutRage! is helping us. Cheques should be made payable to “OutRage!”, with a cover note marked “For Iraqi LGBT”, and sent to OutRage!, PO Box 17816, London SW14 8WT, England, UK.

More info on Iraqi LGBT: http://iraqilgbtuk.blogspot.com/

Iran Exports Anti-Gay Pogrom to Iraq

2006-05-31T18:50:00.000+01:00

By Doug Ireland

Shiite death squads in Iraq are carrying out a campaign that targets gay men for murder. This so-called “sexual cleansing” is happening under the nose of the U.S. military—but American authorities in the Green Zone have refused to do anything about it.

The highly organized campaign of beatings, kidnappings and murders of Iraqi gays follows a death-to-gays fatwa issued last October by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the 77-year-old Iranian who is supreme spiritual leader of all Shia Muslims in Iraq. The fatwa, available on Sistani’s official Web site, puts it this way, “The people involved [in homosexuality] should be killed in the worst, most severe way of killing.”

This reign of terror represents the importation into Iraq of the anti-gay killings being carried out in the Islamic Republic of Iran (see “Iran’s Anti-Gay Pogrom,” January). The Iraqi murders are the work of the Badr Corps, the military arm of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). The largest political formation in Iraq’s Shia community, SCIRI was headquartered in exile in Tehran until Saddam Hussein’s fall.

The SCIRI’s Badr Corps wear the uniforms of Iraqi police, which is under the nominal control of the Interior Ministry. But the Interior Ministry has been heavily infiltrated by Iran. Moreover, the Badr Corps’ salaries are paid by Iran—as a counselor of Sistani’s, Ali Debbagh, who is a member of the Iraqi parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, confirmed in a Feb. 17 interview with Le Monde.

“We are receiving regular reports from our extensive network of contacts with underground gay activists and gay people in Iraq—intimidation, beatings, kidnappings and murders of gays have become an almost daily occurrence,” says Ali Hili, a 33-year-old gay Iraqi exile in London. Five months ago, Hili, along with some 30 other gay Iraqis who have fled to the United Kingdom, founded the Iraqi LGBT U.K. group to document this persecution and support the victims. The group is accumulating evidence that Iranian agents are advising SCIRI. He says there are reports that Iranian agents have been involved in interrogations, questioning those arrested in Persian through translators.

Also, as in Iran, “Badr militants are entrapping gay men via Internet chat rooms,” Hili says. “They arrange a date, and then beat and kill the victim. Males who are unmarried by the age of 30 or 35 are placed under surveillance on suspicion of being gay, as are effeminate men. They will be investigated and warned to get married. Badr will typically give them a month to change their ways. If they don’t, or if they fail to show evidence that they plan to get married, they will be arrested, disappear and eventually be found dead. The bodies are usually discovered with their hands bound behind their back, blindfolds over their eyes and bullet wounds to the back of the head.”

Tahseen, a 31-year-old photography lab technician and underground gay activist, told me by telephone from Baghdad that, “Just last week, four gay people we know of were found dead. I am afraid to leave my room and go out in the street because I will be killed.” He said that men who seem obviously gay “cannot walk in the street. My best friend was recently killed for being gay.”

Tahseen also described the Badr Corps’ Internet entrapment program, noting that “since Sistani’s fatwa, the violence and killings have gotten much, much worse.” Tahseen lives in a Baghdad apartment with his two brothers. “Right now, I have five gay men hiding in my room in fear of their lives,” he said, the anguish audible in his voice. One man given refuge by Tahseen is Bashar, a 34-year-old stage actor, who was forced into hiding after he and his family received death threats. He said that before he went underground, his house was raided several times by the Badr Corps. Fortunately, he was not at home.

“We desperately need protection!” Tahseen pleaded. “But, when we go to the Americans, they laugh at us and don’t do anything.”

According to Hili, “These assaults and murders have been reported by underground gay activists in Baghdad to the Green Zone, but the Americans don’t want to upset the religious authorities, and so they do nothing and treat gay Iraqis with contempt or as an object of humor.”

An April 10 report from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs confirmed that gay Iraqis have been targeted for kidnapping and murder because of their sexual orientation. A week later, the BBC also carried a report, interviewing several victims. But U.S. major media have so far turned a blind eye to this systematic murder of gays in Iraq—and to the refusal of the U.S. occupier to do anything to stop it.

The immediate urgent priority is to Support and Donate Money to LGBT activists in Iraq in order to assist their efforts to communicate information about the wave of homophobic murders in Iraq to the outside world.

Funds raised will also help provide LGBTs under threat of honour killing with refuge in the safer parts of Iraq (including safe houses and food), and assist efforts help them seek asylum abroad.

Iraqi LGBT UK do not yet have bank account. We are working closely with the LGBT human rights group OutRage! in London.

Donations to help Iraqi LGBT in the UK and in Iraq should be made payable to "OutRage!",with a cover note marked "For Iraqi LGBT", and sent to :

OutRage!, PO Box17816, London SW14 8WT, England, UK

Solidarity!

U.S State Dept. ‘troubled’ over anti-gay violence in Iraq (Gay)

2006-05-25T20:03:00.000+01:00

U.S. embassy in Baghdad willing to meet with gay groups

By LOU CHIBBARO JR
25 May 2006

The U.S. State Department said it is “troubled” by reports of increased violence against gays in Iraq and said the U.S. embassy in Baghdad is interested in meeting with gay rights groups to address the problem.

The Bush administration announcement came in response to a request by the U.S. based International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice condemn a rash of anti-gay killings in Iraq and to “ask that U.S. military and civilian personnel in Iraq call these abuses to the attention of Iraqi authorities.”
In an April 20 letter to Rice, Paula Ettelbrick, IGLHRC executive director, urged Rice to “demand a response” from the Iraqi authorities over the anti-gay killings.

In a May 11 reply to Ettelbrick’s letter, L. Victor Hurtado, acting director of the State Department’s Office of Iraq Affairs, said the U.S. is working with the Iraqi government to promote the protection of human rights.

“We are very troubled by these reported incidents of threats, violence, executions, and other violations of humanitarian law against members of the gay and lesbian community in Iraq,” Hurtado said in his letter.

Hurtado said the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad “is interested in further dialogue on this issue” with non-governmental groups, including the Iraq-based group Rainbow for Life, which monitors human rights abuses against gays.

Lt. Col. Barry Venable, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Defense, told the Blade last week that reports of killings of Iraqi gays come at a time when other Iraqi groups are being targeted for assassinations and kidnappings. Among them, he said, are college professors, doctors and owners of liquor stores.

“We try to stop killings and assassinations regardless of the motive,” Venable said. “Violence is violence. We want to see it reduced and eliminated.”
A spokesperson for the Iraqi Embassy to the United States in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.

Violence linked to fatwa

A London-based group of exiled gay Iraqis took credit last week for pressuring a powerful Islamic leader into removing from his website a fatwa calling for the killing of gays in Iraq.

“They didn’t expect a gay rights group could challenge their religious authority, and we succeeded in doing that,” Ali Hili, founder and spokesperson for LGBT Iraqis U.K., said in a telephone interview from London.

But Hili’s group quickly discovered that Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, while removing the announcement of the fatwa from his website, did not revoke the death order itself. Sistani also chose to leave on the site a clause in the fatwa that targets lesbians.

“Conditions are still very bad for gays and lesbians in my country,” Hili said.
Hili’s claims about the removal of the fatwa and his organization’s role in that decision could not be independently confirmed.

The fatwa — which Sistani issued last October — declared that all people “involved” in homosexuality “should be killed in the worst, most severe way of killing.”
Hili said it was too soon to determine whether Sistani’s decision to remove the fatwa announcement from Sistani’s widely read, Arabic language website would curtail a rash of death threats, kidnappings and assassinations of gay Iraqis. The killings increased sharply toward the end of last year, he claimed.

Death squads formed by Shiite Islamic militias have used Internet chat rooms established by gay Iraqis to arrange to meet gays in Baghdad and other cities, Hili said. In some cases the unsuspecting gays ensnared by this tactic have been abducted and shot to death, he said.
Gay Iraqis who have fled their country because of the threats have told gay rights groups in Europe that conditions had gotten so bad that entire categories of men — including unmarried men older than 30, anyone perceived as being effeminate or involved in the arts, and men with longer hair — have come under suspicion of being gay and are targets for death threats.
The Bush administration, while condemning Islamic clerics for threatening to execute a citizen of Afghanistan for converting to Christianity earlier this year, had remained silent over the anti-gay killings in Iraq.

However, during the past week, an official with the State Department and a spokesperson for the Pentagon said U.S. authorities in Iraq were troubled over a rash of assassinations and kidnappings waged by insurgents and Islamic militias against people in all segments of Iraqi society, including gays.

Hili said vague assurances by U.S. and British officials that they oppose violent acts against the Iraqi people have had little impact on the plight of Iraqi gays.
He said gay Iraqis have told his group through telephone and e-mail conversations that U.S. military officials repeatedly have turned down pleas for help by gays who show up at the U.S. military headquarters in the Green Zone in Baghdad.

“One guy went there and said, ‘I’m receiving death threats from the militias, please help me,’” Hili said. “They said we can’t help you, we can’t help all Iraqis. And the guy died. He’s been found shot — executed.”
Another call for help
The British gay rights group Outrage has expressed concern that Britain and the United States may be reluctant to condemn Sistani for his anti-gay fatwa because Sistani opposes the Iraqi insurgency and has backed the creation of an elected Iraqi government.
The 77-year-old Sistani has long called for Islamic law to supersede civil law in Iraq, in marked contrast to President Bush’s call for a constitutional form of government that includes the separation of church and state.
U.S. and other coalition nations haven’t challenge Sistani on human rights matters because he is viewed as the spiritual leader of the overwhelming majority of Iraqi Shiites.
Shiites make up the largest number of Iraqis and are expected to dominate the newly elected government.

According to reports by gay Iraqi exiles and others familiar with the turmoil in Iraq, a powerful militia supported by Iran and believed to be under the leadership of Sistani known as the Badr Corps has organized some of the death squads that target gays.

Hili, pointing to Sistani’s ties to Iran, calls him an Iranian “Trojan Horse” who wants to convert Iraq into the same type of “extremist” state that has taken hold in Iran.
He said he is convinced that the radical Islamic forces in Iran that are responsible for widespread executions of gays in that country prompted Sistani to issue his anti-gay fatwa in Iraq.

Hili said Sistani agreed to remove the fatwa from his website in response to pressure from international human rights groups. The pressure began after Hili’s group and others called attention to anti-gay persecution in Iraq.

He said Sistani’s organization opened negotiations with LGBT Iraqis U.K. through long-distance telephone conferences between London and Iraq and Iran, where the Iranian born Sistani has offices.

Hili said Sistani’s representatives expressed concern over allegations on LGBT Iraqis U.K.’s website that Sistani was misusing his religious authority in Iraqi affairs. Hili said his group used the influence his group’s website apparently was having on Sistani as a bargaining chip to seek removal of the fatwa from the Sistani website.

According to Hili, who said he is in contact with a clandestine network of gays in Iraq, at least two other ayatollahs have issued separate fatwas against Iraqi gays in the past several weeks.

A fatwa is a legal opinion or ruling issued by an Islamic scholar.

The immediate urgent priority is to Support and Donate Money to LGBT activists in Iraq in order to assist their efforts to communicate information about the wave of homophobic murders in Iraq to the outside world.

Funds raised will also help provide LGBTs under threat of honour killing with refuge in the safer parts of Iraq (including safe houses and food), and assist efforts help them seek asylum abroad.

Iraqi LGBT UK do not yet have bank account.

We are working closely with the LGBT human rights group OutRage! in London.

Donations to help Iraqi LGBT in the UK and in Iraq should be made payable to "OutRage!",with a cover note marked "For Iraqi LGBT", and sent to :

OutRage!, PO Box17816, London SW14 8WT, England, UK

Solidarity!

Gays flee as religious militias sentence them all to death

2006-05-17T15:49:00.000+01:00

From Daniel McGrory in Baghdad
The Times 17th May 2006

THE death threat was delivered to Karazan’s father early in the morning by a masked man wearing a police uniform.

The scribbled note was brief. Karazan had to die because he was gay. In the new Baghdad, his sexuality warranted execution by the religious militias.

The father was told that if he did not hand his son over, other family members would be killed.

What scares the city’s residents is how the fanatics’ list of enemies is growing.

It includes girls who refuse to cover their hair, boys who wear theirs too long, booksellers, liberal professors and prostitutes.

Three shops known to sell alcohol were bombed yesterday in the Karrada shopping district.

In this atmosphere of intolerance and intimidation, the militias have made no secret of their hatred of homosexuals.

The man who threatened Karazan said that he was a member of the Thaib (Wolf) Brigade, a commando group reportedly infiltrated by the armed wing of the hardliner Shia party the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Its orders come from fundamentalist clerics.

With his skin-tight clothes and long blonde hair, Karazan, a 23-year-old arts student, stood out in the Shia neighborhood of al-Dura.

He told The Times: “A number of my gay friends have been murdered, so I took this warning seriously.” The family fled this month to a suburb north of the city centre.

Karazan cut his hair short and dyed it black, but he is still too frightened to venture out.

His partner is in the Iraqi Army. With little money and no valid passport, he does not know how he can flee abroad.

Ali Hili, who ran a gay nightclub in Baghdad but fled to Britain this year after receiving death threats, says that he knows of more than 40 men murdered in recent months. “Badr militants used chartrooms to lure them to a rendezvous and then kill them,” he said.

He described a co-ordinate attack on one couple: 38-year-old Karim survived a hand- grenade attack on his home in al-Jameha, but his partner, Ali, was shot dead when he tried to flee his house near by.

Haydar Faiek, 40, a transsexual, was beaten and burnt to death last September in Karrada’s main street. Ammar, 27, was abducted and shot in the head in January.

Meanwhile, a 34-year-old theatre actor, who would only give his name as Bashar, has gone into hiding after a death threat. Two close members of his family have been murdered by militants, who say they will carry on killing his relatives until he turns himself in.

The Interior Ministry says that it is investigating a claim by gay activists that a 14-year-old male prostitute was killed in al-Dura last month by men in police uniforms. The gunmen told the boy’s father that he was executed for “corrupting the community”.

A ministry spokesman said that the Government did not condone vigilante groups. However, Nouri al-Malaki, the Prime Minister-designate, has conceded that the Iraqi security forces have been infiltrated by militia extremists.

Mr. Hili claims that Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most revered spiritual figure in Iraq, provoked the murders by saying on his website in April last year that homosexuals should be killed in the “worst, most severe way”.

He said: “Al-Sistani gave the militias a theological sanction to murder gays.” He added that the ayatollah was forced to lift the fatwa against gays following protests, but refused to remove the reference to the punishment for lesbians.
“These people are taking Iraq back to the Dark Ages,” added Mr. Hili, 33.

His nightclub, in the basement of the Palestine Hotel, was one of the best-known in the city. Restaurants and cafés along Abu Nuwas Street were also popular haunts for gays.

His organization, Iraqi LGBT, runs safe houses in the capital and an underground network to help people to leave the country.

He said: “We could never envisage this happening when Saddam was overthrown. I had no love for the former President, but his regime never persecuted the gay community.”

Upsurge of violence in capital claims dozens

GUNMEN killed five guards then blew up an oil tanker parked near a market in northeastern Baghdad yesterday, killing 19 people and injuring at least 37 others, police said. The blast was an apparent sectarian attack against a Shia neighborhood.

A United Arab Emirates diplomat was seized as he walked home from his embassy in the Mansour district of Baghdad. His Sudanese guard was shot and wounded.

Four workers at a US base in Taji were killed by gunmen in northern Baghdad. Three US soldiers were killed by roadside bombs, and six civilians died in crossfire when police and suspected insurgents fought in Baghdad.

The US military said that it killed a militant planting a bomb southwest of Baghdad.

From: The Times

Sistani removes 'death to gays' fatwa

2006-05-12T21:54:00.000+01:00

Iraqi gay protesters win success

Sistani urged to condemn homophobic murders and scrap anti-lesbian fatwa

Plea for fatwa against all vigilante murders

London – 12 May 2006

Iraqi gays and lesbians are claiming success following the decision of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani to remove from his website a fatwa calling for the killing of homosexuals in the "worst, most severe way possible" (see the fatwa text below).

The removal on 10 May follows protests to Sistani by the London office of the Iraqi gay rights organisation, Iraqi LGBT, which represents a clandestine network of lesbian and gay activists inside Iraq’s major cities, including Baghdad, Najaf, Karbala, Hilla, Duhok and Basra.

Following two weeks of negotiations with Iraqi LGBT – UK, Sistani’s office agreed to remove the fatwa calling for the murder of gay men, but has curiously refused to remove the fatwa urging punishment for lesbianism.

Initially, Sistani’s office had demanded that Iraqi LGBT-UK delete their criticisms of Sistani from their website and apologise to the Grand Ayatollah for questioning his religious authority.

Iraqi LGBT-UK refused. It issued a counter-demand that Sistani remove his ‘death to gays’ fatwa from his website. After two weeks of sometimes tense negotiations, Sistani’s representatives in London and Najaf agreed to drop the homophobic fatwa from his website – except for the section calling for the punishment of lesbianism.

“We welcome the decision to remove the most murderously homophobic part of Sistanti’s fatwa from his website,” said gay Iraqi refugee, Ali Hili, who heads the organisation Iraqi LGBT – UK (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender). Mr Ali is also Middle East Affairs spokesperson for the British LGBT movement, OutRage!, which works closely with Iraqi LGBT – UK.

“This decision does not go far enough. The fatwa has been removed from Sistani’s website only. It has not been revoked. We want the entire fatwa withdrawn, including the hateful denunciation calling for the punishment of lesbians.

“Iraqi LGBT-UK urges Sistani to apologise and revoke his fatwa calling for the murder of homosexuals, and to issue a new fatwa condemning all vigilante violence, including vigilante attacks on gay and lesbian people.

“We believe that Sistani's fatwa has encouraged and sanctioned the current wave of execution-style assassinations of lesbians and gay men. He owes gay Iraqis an apology. He owes all Iraqis an apology for setting straight Iraqis against gay Iraqis.

“Endorsing the murder of other human beings is unIslamic. Our Muslim faith is one of love, compassion, tolerance and mercy. Hatred and prejudice have no legitimate place in our religion.

“Sistani’s encouragement of homophobic violence provokes negative views towards the Islamic faith and towards Muslim people.

“Iraqi LGBT-UK holds Sistani personally responsible for the murder of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Iraqis. He gives the killers theological sanction and encouragement.

“Evidence we have received from our underground gay contacts inside Iraq shows rising levels of homophobic threats, intimidation and violence by fundamentalist supporters of Sistani. These attacks have intensified since Sistani issued his anti-gay fatwa.

“Grand Ayatollah Sistani is the spiritual leader of all Shia Muslims in Iraq and around the world. He is also the spiritual leader of Iraq’s main Islamic fundamentalist movement, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), which plays a leading role in the Iraqi government.

“SCIRI’s armed wing is the Badr corps, which is responsible for much of the sectarian and fundamentalist violence in Iraq today.

“The Badr Corps is a terrorist organisation and uses terrorist methods against political, religious, sexual and ethnic dissidents. It is behind much of the sectarian violence in Iraq today, including suicide bombings, kidnappings and the assassination of Sunnis, moderate Shia, trade unionists, women’s rights activists, gay people and secularists.

“The government in Iraq consults regularly with Sistani on political, social and moral issues. He wields huge influence over Iraqi government policy and the over Iraqi Shia public opinion.

“Sistani is not even Iraqi. He is an Iranian national who has set himself up as a religious leader in Iraq. He wants to impose an Iranian-style theocracy on the Iraqi people.

“The British government paid for Sistani to have medical treatment in the UK in 2004, and fetes him as a revered Muslim leader.

“Despite Badr’s murderous record, the UK allows its political arm, SCIRI, to have offices and fundraise in the UK.

“The Badr Corps has instituted a witch-hunt of lesbian and gay Iraqis – including violent beatings, kidnappings and assassinations.

“Badr agents have a network of informers who, among other things, target alleged 'immoral behaviour'. They kill gays, unveiled women, prostitutes, people who sell or drink alcohol, and those who listen to western music and wear western fashions.

“Badr militants are entrapping gay men via internet chat rooms. They arrange a date, and then beat and kill the victim.

“Males who are unmarried by the age of 30 or 35 are placed under surveillance on suspicion of being gay, as are effeminate men. They will be investigated and warned to get married. Badr will typically give them a month to change their ways. If they don't change their behaviour, or if they fail to show evidence that they plan to get married, they will be arrested, disappear and eventually be found dead. The bodies are usually discovered with their hands bound behind their back, blindfolds over their eyes, and a bullet wound in the back of the head.

“Our sources inside Iraq report the murders of the following gay and bisexual men. All the killings bear the hallmarks of the execution-style murders for which the Badr organisation is notorious.

“These killings are just a few of the many we have been able to get details about. They are the tip of an iceberg of religious-motivated summary executions. Gay Iraqis are living in fear of discovery and murder,” said Mr Hili.

Karim, aged 38, survived a hand grenade attack on his house in the Al-Jameha district of Baghdad in 2004. The attack by members of the Badr Corps, left him with severe facial disfigurement and shrapnel in his body. Simultaneously, the Badr Corps murdered his partner, Ali, at his house, also in the Al-Jameha district. They shot Ali as he tried to escape.

Haydar Faiek, aged 40, a transsexual Iraqi, was beaten and burned to death by Badr militias in the main street in the Al-Karada district of Baghdad in September 2005.

Sarmad and Khalid were partners who lived in the Al-Jameha area of Baghdad. Persons unknown revealed their same-sex relationship. They were abducted by the Badr organisation in April 2005. Their bodies were found two months later, in June, bound, blindfolded and shot in the back of the head.

Naffeh, aged 45, disappeared in August 2005. His family were informed that he was kidnapped by the Badr organisation. His body was found in January 2006. He, too, had been subjected to an execution-style killing.

Ammar, aged 27, was abducted and shot in back of the head in Baghdad by suspected Badr militias in January 2006.

Bashar, an actor aged 34, who resides in Baghdad, has been forced to go into hiding, after receiving death threats against him and his family. Before he went underground, his house was raided several times by the Badr Corps. Fortunately, he was not at home, otherwise he fears he would have been kidnapped and killed.

A copy of Sistani's fatwa, with translation, follows below.

Further information:

Ali Hili in London

Mobile phone: + 44 (0) 79 819 594 53

Email: iraqilgbt@yahoo.co.uk

Weblog: http://iraqilgbtuk.blogspot.com/

The text of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani’s fatwa, calling for the killing of sodomites, as it was shown on his website prior to its removal on 10 May 2006.

It was on the Sistani website

www.sistani.org

It was under the section Istiftaaat. You went to letter L in Arabic, and looked up the word Lewat which means (sodomy). See question 5.

5

§ السؤال : ما هو حكم اللواط والسحاق؟§ الجواب : حرام. ويعاقب فاعلهما بل يقتل فاعل اللواط اشد قتلة.

Direct link:
http://www.sistani.org/html/ara/main/index-istifta.php?page=4&lang=ara&part=4

Q5: What is the judgment for sodomy and lesbianism?
A5: Forbidden. Punished, in fact, killed. The people involved should be killed in the worst, most severe way possible.

ENDS

IRAQI LGBT

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