THE GUARDIAN: Both countries deny any Iraqi state involvement in anti-gay militias, but LGBT supporters suggest otherwise
Last week, 12 Iraqi police officers burst into a house in Karbala, beat up and blindfolded the six occupants and bundled them off in three vans, taking the computers they found with them. The house was then burned down by unknown people.
The house was a new "emergency shelter" run by the Iraqi LGBT organisation.
Two days later, one of the men turned up in hospital with a throat wound saying he'd been tortured. Iraqi LGBT has ordered those in its other two safe houses to move immediately.
The group says the police action is consistent with other state attacks on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people in Iraq. It has information that the other five – two gay men, one lesbian and two transgender people – have been transported 100 miles north to the interior ministry in Baghdad, where they'll be interrogated (ie tortured) to find out more about the group. Then, going on past experience, they'll probably be handed to militias loyal to Shi'a clerics Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani and Muqtada al-Sadr (both of whom have called for homosexuals to be put to death) and their mutilated bodies will turn up later.
But it is also clear from past experience that there is unlikely to be a sustained international outcry from gay people, governments or others about this latest incident. >>> Paul Canning | Wednesday, June 23, 2010
