Hunting Gays In Iraq: How the Death Squads Work

From ZNet:

"Every gay and lesbian here lives in fear, just pure fear, of being beaten or killed," says Ahmad, a 34-year-old gay man, via telephone from his home in Baghdad. "Homosexuality is seen here as imported from the West and as the work of the devil."

Ahmad is masculine and "straight-acting," he says. "I can go out without being harassed or followed." But that's not the case for his more effeminate gay friends. "They just cannot go outside, period," he says. "If they did, they would be killed." To help them survive, Ahmad has been bringing food and other necessities to their homes. "The situation for us gay people here is beyond bad and dangerous," he says.

Life for gay and lesbian citizens in war-torn Iraq has become grave and is getting worse every day. While President Bush hails a new, "democratic" society, thousands of civilians are dying in a low-level civil war -- and gays are being targeted just for being gay. The Badr Corps -- the military arm of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI for short), the country's most powerful Shiite political group -- has launched a campaign of "sexual cleansing," marshaling death squads to exterminate homosexuality.

And

All Hussein thinks about is getting out of Iraq. "Things were bad under Saddam for gays," he says, "but not as bad as now. Then, no one feared for their lives. Now, you can be gotten rid of at any time."

Click here for the rest.

We already knew that democracy and freedom in Iraq are a big joke, but this is very disturbing news indeed. Apparently, it's open season on homosexuals in over there, and, as the article notes, many of the death squads are working within the government. The government we created. This is truly fucked. Imagine Fred Phelps' gang of psychos taking control of the US. But this is worse. Phelps is an idiot and an incompetent, good only for pissing people off: the SCIRI is the exact opposite; they're efficient, cold, and brutal killers.

We're responsible for this shit--like the man says, it was bad before, but not like this.

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