Iraqi militias are increasingly torturing and executing men suspected of homosexuality, but the authorities in Baghdad are doing nothing to stop the violence, Human Rights Watch said on Monday.
"This report... documents a campaign of violence against men in Iraq who are suspected of being gay or who simply don't act masculine enough in the eyes of their killers," said Scott Long, director of HRW's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights Programme.
The New-York based group said hundreds of men have been kidnapped, tortured and killed this year in a wave of violence that began in the Sadr City stronghold of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia in Baghdad.
The report, entitled "'They want us exterminated': Murder, Torture, Sexual Orientation and Gender in Iraq'," said it is almost impossible to calculate how many men were killed, but estimated the figure in the hundreds.
"What we found is disturbing," said HRW researcher Rasha Moumneh. "We heard stories of murder, extra-judicial executions, brutal torture, abductions, extortions, detainees and threats.
"The reasons behind this campaign are undoubtedly political," she said.
Moumneh said the US troop surge in Iraq in 2007 led to many Mahdi Army fighters being detained.
"After their release, the Mahdi Army then tried to recuperate for its lost authority by fashioning itself as a force for the moral cleansing of Iraqi society of the vice that had been brought into Iraq after the invasion of 2003," she said.
"And so began a campaign targeting a particularly vulnerable segment of society under the cloak of morality."
HRW said Mahdi Army spokesmen had suggested that violent action was the remedy for the "feminisation" of Iraqi men, but a Sadrist spokesman said on Monday there was no proof of this.
"To accuse, you need proof," Sheikh Salah Obaidi, a spokesman for the Sadrist movement in Iraq's holy Shiite city of Najaf, told AFP.
"There are other religious, political and social entities that share our rejection of this phenomenon. So there is no reason to accuse us without proof.
"It's true that we are opposed to this unfolding phenomenon in Iraq, which we consider bad and foreign to Iraqi society," Obaidi added. "We are organising seminars and meetings to deal with this in a civilised manner."
Motives for the murders include "fears that Iraqi men's masculinity is under threat," HRW reported, saying that Iraqi doctors and morgue employees have records of grotesque torture, including mutilation and even anuses glued shut.
The report also said some of the murders were so-called honour killings carried out by victims' family members "because 'unmanly' behaviour threatens the reputation of the family or tribe."
Some Iraqis interviewed by HRW charged that in some cases members of the security forces had colluded and even joined in the killing.
"Iraq?s leaders are supposed to defend all Iraqis, not abandon them to armed agents of hate," Long said. "Turning a blind eye to torture and murder threatens the rights and life of every Iraqi."
Survivors told of militiamen raiding homes and interrogating victims before killing them in order to identify other potential victims.
One man recounted how his partner of 10 years was abducted and killed in April: "It was late one night, and they came to take my partner at his parents' home. Four armed men barged into the house, masked and wearing black.
"They asked for him by name; they insulted him and took him in front of his parents... He was found in the neighbourhood the day after. They had thrown his corpse in the garbage. His genitals were cut off and a piece of his throat was ripped out."
Copyright 2009 AFP Global Edition
