Where to connect with gay guys in Basrah Iraq
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Instead, most people maintained to us that the Mahdi Army had always been the main actor in the violence, turning its attention at irregular intervals since to what it saw as sexual immorality in Iraq. Intermittent violence by Sunni militias, particularly al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, accompanied this in Baghdad and elsewhere.
Mustafa lived in Basra, but travelled periodically to Baghdad to visit places where gay men congregated. This became more dangerous after Saddam's overthrow. Internet use spread after Saddam's overthrow and became an important social medium for people who desired, for whatever reason, to guard their anonymity. Samir says that in , "I decided to meet this guy whom I had got to know over [Internet] chat. I went to his apartment, and I found four men there, with black clothes and beards-the signs of the Mahdi Army. They beat me up and slashed my face and hands with knives.
As Munir indicated, however, other militias also engaged in periodic murders. Wahid, from a Sunni area of Baghdad, says al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia killed his boyfriend in , when there was a "general cleansing of people they thought were immoral. Barbers who pluck out hairs with a string could be targeted because that was haram [forbidden]. They murdered ice-sellers because there was no ice in the time of the Prophet. Omar is from Samarra. In , "the Sunni militias killed my boyfriend," he says-dating the attack a few months after the massive February 22 bombing of the al-Askari mosque, one of the holiest sites in Shi'a Islam, an assault widely attributed to al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia.
Abductions were a recurrent tool of intimidation as well as gathering information. Yehia related how Mahdi Army militiamen kidnapped him in Nuri, kidnapped by Ministry of Interior forces in as recounted in detail above, told of a brush with the Mahdi Army almost three years earlier:. He showed us scars still marking his arms from the embers. Pervasive social prejudice, family repression, lack of any effective legal protection, and sudden outbursts of lethal violence all mean that suspect men in Iraq are in steady danger.
Few Iraqis have altogether escaped the spreading circles of sectarian, retaliatory, or random violence since the occupation began, just as the state's ferocity under Saddam left few citizens wholly unscathed. Men seen as effeminate or suspected of homosexual conduct are not necessarily more intensely targeted than other groups or identities have been in recent years.
However, they have certain specific disadvantages.
The man holds up two pictures of his friend, which tell the story of what it Fear as death squads hunt Iraq's gays and "emos" “We, as the gay community are connected, like a string. Additional reporting by Saif Tawfiq and Ahmed Rasheed in Baghdad and Mohammed Kadhim in Basra, Iraq; Editing by. In in Basra, Interior Ministry forces injured dozens of people and Al-Hashimi was well connected to Iraq's political elite, including its.
Their isolated circles, organized round a few networks of friends or anonymous aliases on the Internet, constitute nothing like a cohesive community that could furnish mutual support. Nor, in most cases, are their families willing to offer any help or protection, even if they could.
Fadi added that private threats are also part of the repertory: "If they [the Mahdi Army] are not quite sure about you, they say, 'You have to stop it or you will be killed. For example, if you are wearing cologne, the first thing you get asked is, "Where did you get the money to buy this? On top of all that, many Iraqi gays whom we helped to find refuge in neighbouring Syria have now been forced to flee the violence there and return to Iraq. They slaughtered him; they cut his throat. Men came into Ja'far's shop and offered him a drugged drink or candy. Months after the clash, he is applying for asylum in Minnesota. Sources say that "Three lists, each with the names of ten gay men, were circulated in Sadr City for a few hours.
Many men who identify as gay have nowhere to turn, and no recourse but to leave the country. For most this means going to another, nearby country in the region. They must then endure the time-consuming procedure of refugee status determination, in which the UNHCR evaluates their case and decides whether their claim is valid. After that comes the long and uncertain wait to be resettled elsewhere; the UNHCR must present the refugee's file to sympathetic governments and ask them to accept him. During these processes, which can last years, the applicants must stay where they are. For Iraqis who have already faced persecution based on sexual orientation or gender identity, no country around Iraq is safe.
Years of violence in Iraq since have generated a massive crisis of displacement. No figures are available-or are likely to become so-for what proportion of any of these numbers have fled persecution based on sexual orientation or gender identity. The relevant numbers are almost certainly quite small as against the overall, overwhelming flood of people on the move.
However, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender LGBT Iraqis in the refugee system face, once again, specific dangers. Consensual homosexual conduct is illegal in all the countries surrounding Iraq except Turkey and Jordan. In Iran and Saudi Arabia it is punished, under certain circumstances, by death. Refugees fleeing persecution in Iraq because of their sexual orientation and gender identity may face renewed persecution in virtually all the countries where they can find interim refuge.
Moreover, the absence of an open and substantial LGBT community capable of providing even the barest mutual assistance, and the lack of any family support for most LGBT people forced to flee, continue to restrict their resources and leave them unprotected in the Diaspora. Turkey has no legal penalties for homosexual conduct, but violence against LGBT people is pervasive. In order to keep them out of major cities, the Turkish authorities routinely require asylum seekers and refugees to remain in secondary cities and towns where support services and civil society organizations are few and far between-and where a conservative social climate puts LGBT people at risk of discrimination and abuse.
Meanwhile, although Jordan also has no criminal penalties for homosexual conduct, the social and political climate is still more repressive than Turkey's. One man described how Jordanian security forces blackmailed and illegally expelled him in because of his sexual orientation:. Syria has been generous in receiving displaced Iraqis, but its security and surveillance apparatus makes the strict legal penalties against homosexual conduct a severe threat to LGBT refugees.
One man, registered with the UNHCR in Damascus-where he and a few fellow claimants received periodic support from the London-based Iraqi LGBT group in the form of money transfers-told us how security forces there deported him:. Its Eligibility Guidelines for Assessing the International Protection Needs of Iraqi Asylum-Seekers observe that "While homosexuality is not prohibited by Iraqi law, it is a strict taboo and considered to be against Islam. Since , Iraq's largely marginalized and vulnerable lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender LGBT community has frequently been targeted for attacks in an environment of impunity.
The threats and difficulties those people face in the surrounding countries of first asylum, however, demand attention.
They can only be resolved by a commitment-on the part both of the UNHCR and of Western governments that have made paper promises about refugee protection-to remove lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Iraqi claimants from danger, and resettle them expeditiously in safe countries. Hamid said of the killers who had murdered his boyfriend: "They say that they are Muslims, but they have nothing of Islam. They use religion as a disguise to do what they want. If, as some believe, the killing campaign began as a way for militia forces to recuperate their reputations and gain the luster of defending morality, it has not worked.
The invasions of privacy, the arbitrary murders, the brutality and torture have flouted religion and morals alike. They have left a growing number of Iraqis-even those who are not grieving their relatives and sons-appalled. In May , one reporter wrote courageously in Sawt al-Iraq that the Mahdi Army "has once again sharpened its claws":. An year-old who had been threatened with death, and knew several friends who had been killed, made much the same point when he told us:.
The government of Iraqi has legal obligations under international human rights treaty law and customary law.
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It is bound by its own treaty commitments and those of previous Iraqi governments. These rights shall be protected by law. The UN Human Rights Committee charged with authoritatively interpreting the ICCPR and monitoring countries' compliance with it has repeatedly found states in violation of their obligations under Article 9 if they have failed to take adequate steps to protect people in the face of repeated death threats.
The Committee has also criticized states' failure to protect people from sexual-orientation-based violence. The UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions has noted that where the criminal justice system has failed to investigate murders based on sexual orientation or gender identity, the "state bears responsibility under human rights law for the many who have been murdered by private individuals.
The Arab Charter on Human Rights also affirms, in its article 13, that "The States parties shall protect every person in their territory from being subjected to physical or mental torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.
"They Want Us Exterminated"
They shall take effective measures to prevent such acts and shall regard the practice thereof or participation therein, as a punishable offence. The ICCPR and the Convention against Torture detail what states must do to enforce the prohibition, including the duty to investigate, prosecute, and provide effective remedies when violations occur. Article 2 of the ICCPR requires a state party to "ensure to all individuals within its territory and subject to its jurisdiction the rights recognized in the present Covenant, without distinction of any kind.
The ICCPR affirms the right to privacy article 17 , the freedom of expression article 19 , and the freedom of assembly article These rights entail the freedom to lead an intimate life peacefully; the freedom to express oneself, including one's gender identity, through clothes or comportment; and the freedom to move and meet in public without fear of harassment or assault. The state must protect people in the enjoyment of these rights. Persecution or harassment of people for exercising those freedoms must be prevented where possible, and punished where it occurs.
Iraqi laws regulating any of these rights can only impose such limitations as are consistent with international legal standards-that is, they must be strictly necessary to achieve a legitimate purpose. As the UN Human Rights Committee has advised, "Restrictive measures must conform to the principle of proportionality; they must be appropriate to achieve their protective function; they must be the least intrusive instrument amongst those which might achieve the desired result; and they must be proportionate to the interest to be protected.
No such restrictions should ever be used to penalize the work of human rights defenders, including those who take up issues of sexual orientation or gender identity. Of special importance will be These groups are often very vulnerable to prejudice, to marginalization and to public repudiation, not only by State forces but other social actors.
Biological sex : the biological classification of bodies as male or female, based on such factors as external sex organs, internal sexual and reproductive organs, hormones, or chromosomes. Gender : the social and cultural codes as opposed to biological sex used to distinguish between what a society considers "masculine" or "feminine" conduct. Gender expression: the external characteristics and behaviors that societies define as "masculine" or "feminine"-including such attributes as dress, appearance, mannerisms, speech patterns, and social behavior and interactions.
Gender identity: a person's internal, deeply felt sense of being male or female, or something other than male and female.
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Gender-based violence : violence directed against a person on the basis of gender or sex. Gender-based violence can include sexual violence, domestic violence, psychological abuse, sexual exploitation, sexual harassment, harmful traditional practices, and discriminatory practices based on gender.
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The term originally described violence against women but is now widely taken to include violence targeting both women and men because of how they experience and express their genders and sexualities. Sexual orientation : the way in which a person's sexual and emotional desires are directed. The term categorizes according to the sex of the object of desire-that is, it describes whether a person is attracted primarily to people of the same or opposite sex, or to both. Gay : a synonym for homosexual in English and some other languages, sometimes used only to describe males who are attracted primarily to other males.
LGBT : lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender; an inclusive term for groups and identities sometimes also associated together as "sexual minorities.
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This report was written by Scott Long, director of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights program at Human Rights Watch. Ahmad A. Ahmad, professor in the department of religious studies at the University of California Santa Barbara and consultant to Human Rights Watch, researched and drafted materials on shari'a law.
Numerous people both inside and outside Iraq who cannot be named for their own safety, or their families' security, furnished information and help in many other ways.