Sep 06, 2006Articles: Situation of Iraqi gays worsens
By VZ
(London) As Iraq continues to spiral closer to all-out civil war the situation for the country's LGBT community worsens by the day a British gay rights activist said on Monday.
(London) As Iraq continues to spiral closer to all-out civil war the situation for the country's LGBT community worsens by the day a British gay rights activist said on Monday.
Outrage leader Peter Tatchell, writing in the leftist weekly Tribune, says that information reaching the organization points to a "Talibanisation of Iraq"
Citing sources within the country, Tatchell says that some Baghdad neighborhoods, are now under the de facto control of Taliban-style fundamentalist militias.
"Two militias are doing most of the killing," he writes. "They are the armed wings of major parties in the 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 ruling coalition."
Tatchell highlights the situations experienced by a number of Baghdad gays. One, Wissam Auda, was a member of Iraq's Olympic tennis team. Tatchell writes that Wissam "had been receiving death threats from religious fanatics on account of his homosexuality."
On 25 May, his vehicle was ambushed by fundamentalist militias in the al-Saidiya district of Baghdad. Wissam, together with his coach Hussein Ahmed Rashid and team mate Nasser Ali Hatem, were all summarily executed in the street."
Tatchell said that Outrage is working with an underground LGBT group in Baghdad and has established "a clandestine network of gay activists inside Iraq's major cities" to ensure news of the gay community's situation reaches the West.
In April, IRIN, a United Nations sponsored media group, reported that armed gangs are regularly kidnapping and holding for ransom Iraqis - many of them gay.
Quoting a Baghdad LGBT organization, IRIN reported that that 12 members of the organization had been killed by kidnappers when their ransom demands could not be met. Another 70 had been threatened with kidnapping.
In past, the prominent Shiite cleric Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani called for death to gays.
