Iraq's Anti-Gay Pogrom

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It is easy for the militias to score points by attacking groups that are universally disliked, like effeminate men, Long notes. Like most patriarchal cultures, Iraqis take pride in their machismo. “Muslim-ness” and everything that comes with it make it easier for men to be macho—and the opposite of macho is frowned upon and often an object of derision.

The report also backs up the argument that the pleas of older white gay activists to go and "save" Iraqi or Iranian homosexuals are of little value. The mostly Western constructs of the ever-expanding LGBT category have little or no meaning in many other languages, including Arabic. Much has been made of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s alleged denial of Iranian homosexuality, and there is an eagerness to paint the “atrocities” against “Muslim gays” with the same broad brushstrokes in the Middle East and beyond.

The Mubarak regime’s arrest and torture of gay men in Egypt in 2001 is different from the present-day killing campaign in Iraq, Long points out, and certainly different from what is not happening in Iran.

“People are being killed in Iraq,” he says. “There was never any evidence of a serious crackdown on gays in Iran over the last two years—while [President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad certainly ramped up the regime’s moral policing of dress and conduct, gays were not high on his list of targets. And while thousands of people were probably arrested in Egypt during the crackdown in 2001-04, many of them brutally tortured, it wasn’t a killing campaign.”

The bloody campaign of moral cleansing continues in Iraq. Methods of killing have included glue being injected up the anuses of men suspected of being homosexual, and the report claims that “hundreds” may have been killed.

Another voice from the report:

It was about 4 p.m. and four men came inside the shop. They lingered and when I tried to get them to leave, they pulled out guns. They had three cars—one a black Daewoo—and they put me in one and covered my eyes. It was the Mahdi Army—they are the ones who operate in the area. The place they took me to wasn’t far away: it was very close to a mosque or actually in the courtyard, because I could hear the call to prayer very clearly. When they hauled me out of the car they beat me until I fell unconscious.

Late the next day, they came to me and said, ‘We know you are gay, we know you’re farakhji’ [a derogatory term used in Iraq for men who have sex with men]. They pulled out a list of names and started reading them: You know these perverts, you know X and Y and Z. They gave the first name and the neighborhood where he lived. I knew four who were still alive. One they had already killed. They had killed my friend Waleed in February, before I was kidnapped. I asked Waleed’s brother about it later, and he told me, ‘Waleed was slaughtered in the street. Don’t ask more.’ I am sure he was killed because he was gay. He was walking with a bunch of straight friends, and he was killed, not them: He was the one they targeted. He was the first name on the list they read me. There were many more names I didn’t know. I admitted knowing those four, but I said it was only because they were customers in my shop. They interrogated me for three hours that night. They kept me blindfolded and gagged, and when they wanted me to speak, they took out the gag. They demanded I give them names of other gays. At night they got a broomstick, and they used it to rape me.”

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