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News > World

Western Intervention to Blame for Murder of LGBT Iraqis: Activist

  • Buildings destroyed during previous clashes are seen as Iraqi forces battle with Islamic State militants in Mosul, Iraq.

    Buildings destroyed during previous clashes are seen as Iraqi forces battle with Islamic State militants in Mosul, Iraq. | Photo: Reuters

Published 9 July 2017
Opinion

Murders against LGBT people in the Arab country spiked soon after the Western invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Western intervention is to blame for the spike of murders against LGBT people in Iraq, a queer Iraqi argues in a recent article in The Independent.

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Amrou Al-Kadhi, an Iraqi writer, performer and filmmaker living in the United Kingdom, notes that murders against queer and trans people in the Arab country spiked soon after the Western invasion of Iraq in 2003. According to humanitarian reports, between 2004 and 2009, 680 people were murdered due to gender and sexual non-conformism.

The founder of IraQueer, an organization that supports LGBT people in Iraq, Amir Ashour presses that the rise of the Islamic State group has been deadly for queer and trans people. They are publicly exposed by the group, with their names and photos posted on walls in Baghdad.

Just this week, Iraqi actor Karar Nushi was murdered due to rumors of his homosexuality. His long hair, deemed “transgressive,” made him a target, and he was found brutally stabbed on a street in Baghdad.

“Such incidents are co-opted by the far right as a way to incite xenophobia,” argues Al-Kadhi. “Just as the far right use LGBTQI+ rights as a way to brew racism, Isis exploit LGBTQI+ people as a tool to fuel anti-Western hatred. Disdain for the West is potent on Iraqi soil — what did we expect after destroying a civilization for no actual reason?”

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He explained that homosexuality has come to be viewed as a “Western export.”

“Amir’s team on the ground have seen how LGBTQI+ bodies are weaponised by Isis as being symptomatic of the Western corruption of Iraq,” writes Al-Kadhi. “It seems that no matter where you look, queer bodies are the scapegoat for extremism.”

He adds that while deadly attacks against LGBT people have risen due to the invasion, countries like the United Kingdom deny asylum to Iraqi queer and trans people, citing that being gay in Iraq is not actually illegal.

“It’s hard to get your head around this without wanting to cry: the West has destroyed a once glorious civilization, has had a role in allowing LGBTQI+ hate crimes to escalate on foreign soil, yet refuses to help those lives who are now endangered because of this,” he remarked.

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