Gays hunted and tortured in Baghdad

BAGHDAD - Sitting on the floor, wearing traditional Islamic clothes and holding a notebook, Abu Hamizi spends at least six hours a day searching internet chatrooms linked to gay websites.

The 22-year-old is not looking for new friends, but for victims.

"It is the easiest way to find those people who are destroying Islam and who want to dirty the reputation we took centuries to build up," he said.

When he finds them, Hamizi arranges for them to be attacked and sometimes killed.

Hamizi, a computer science graduate, is at the cutting edge of a new wave of violence against gay men in Iraq.

Made up of hardline extremists, Hamizi's group and others like it are believed to be responsible for the deaths of more than 130 gay Iraqi men since the beginning of the year alone.

The deputy leader of the group, which is based in Baghdad, explained its campaign.

"Animals deserve more pity than the dirty people who practise such sexual depraved acts," he said.

"We make sure they know why they are being held and give them the chance to ask God's forgiveness before they are killed."

The violence against Iraqi gays is a key test of the Government's ability to protect vulnerable minority groups after the Americans have gone.

Dr Toby Dodge, of London University's Queen Mary College, believes that the violence may be a consequence of the success of the Government of Nouri Maliki.

"Militia groups whose raison d'etre was security in their communities are seeing that function now fulfilled by the police. So their focus has shifted to the moral and cultural sphere, reverting to classic Islamist tactics of policing moral boundaries," Dodge said.

Homosexuality was not criminalised under Saddam Hussein - Iraq in the 1960s and 1970s had a relatively liberated gay scene. Violence against gays started in the aftermath of the invasion in 2003.

Since 2004, according to Ali Hali, chairman of the London-based Iraqi LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) group, 680 have died in Iraq - at least 70 in the past five months. Seven victims were women.

According to Hali, Iraq has become "the worst place for homosexuals on Earth". The killings are brutal, with victims ritually tortured.

Azhar al-Saeed's son was one. "He didn't follow what Islamic doctrine tells but he was a good son," she said.

"Three days after his kidnapping, I found a note on my door with blood spread over it and a message saying it was my son's purified blood and telling me where to find his body.

"We found his body with signs of torture and without his genitals. I will carry this image with me until my dying day."

Police said the killings were not aimed at gays but were isolated remnants of the sectarian violence. Hamizi's group, however, boasts that two people a day are chosen to be "investigated".

The roommate of Haydar, 26, was kidnapped and killed three months ago.

After Haydar contacted the last person his friend had been chatting with on the net, he found a letter alerting him "about the dangers of behaving against Islamic rules". Haydar plans to flee to Amman, the Jordanian capital. "I have ... to run away before I suffer the same fate," he said.

- OBSERVER