SIX GAY MEN MURDERED IN IRAQ

Two gay men were killed in Baghdad’s Sadr City slum while the bodies of four more were recently unearthed. This after reports that local clerics have been condemning homosexuals in their weekly prayer sermons.

It is alleged that the two men were killed last Thursday, with the main suspects being family members who were ashamed about their homosexuality.

The four bodies which were found buried had signs around their necks written in Arabic reading “pervert” and “puppies”. Puppy is said to be a derogatory word used in Baghdad to describe homosexuals.

Homosexuality is illegal throughout the Middle East, but the situation in Iraq has become increasingly worse since the fall of Saddam Hussein and the rise of religious militia.

“The western invasion of Iraq in 2003 ended the tyrannical Baathist dictatorship. But it also destroyed a secular state, created chaos and lawlessness and allowed the flourishing of religious fundamentalism. The result has been an Islamist-inspired homophobic terror campaign against LGBT Iraqis,” said human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell.

“Queers are being shot dead in their homes, streets and workplaces,” he added. “Even suspected gay children are being murdered. They killers claim to be doing these assassinations at the behest of the ‘democratic’ Iraqi government, in order to eradicate what they see as immoral, un-Islamic behaviour.”

In 2005, Iraq’s leading Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani issued a fatwa urging the killing of LGBT people in Iraq in the “worst, most severe way” possible.