I was directed to this article by my friend's blurty post. It's from men.style.com and it is an incredible and harrowing story about a gay Iraqi by the name of Ali Hili (real name suppressed to protect him), his tribulations and persecution faced for being gay as well as the numerous stories of his friends and other Iraqis who were killed because of who they are.

The litany of abuses and horrific death is mind boggling:

1. Haider "Dina" Faiek (male transsexual) - beaten by uniformed officers who doused her with gasoline and set her on fire while she was still alive.
   
2. Emad (transgendered woman) - killed by being run over with a car, literally, with tyre marks over the body.
   
3. Ahmed (gay) - hand grenade thrown onto his friend's lawn while he was visiting, sending shrapnel through the windows and embedding it in their faces.
   
4. Ahmed's friend (gay) - Assailants shot him dead in his home, execution-style.
   
5. Ahmed's boyfriend (gay) - As he was entering the local gym with Ahmed; assailants ambushed them there and opened fire. Ahmed reached the bathroom and hid there; his boyfriend was killed.
   
6. Two teenagers were killed, reportedly for working as gay prostitutes; an actor was holed up with five others in an impromptu shelter; another transgendered woman was assassinated; a lesbian couple from Najaf were slain, etc.

It seems to have started with a fatwa issued by the Shia Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani who said that anyone involved in homosexuality "should be killed in the worst, most severe way possible."

Of course one would think upon reading this, "So what? Many Iraqis are dying every day. What difference does it make if they die because they are Sunni or Shia, gay, straight or transgendered, etc?"

And further more, reading and hearing about bombings and killings of ordinary Iraqis everyday have somehow numbed us to the brutality that is the reality of life in Iraq after Bush's adventure. I stand guilty of that too.

But reading the above article somehow brought that awful reality closer to me. The only similarity between Ali and me is that we are both gay men. Apart from that, we are as different as a white European is different from a black African living in say... Nigeria. However his story made him a real person as opposed to just another casualty figure if he had died as a result of the ongoing sectarian war or as a result of being killed for his sexuality. Thank god he made it out alive.

And if we think that this really doesn't concern us, we need to remember that regardless of whether we are straight or gay, who we are and where we were born in is a result of our involuntary and compulsory participation in the great ovarian lottery (to use Warren Buffet's term).

What if we were born a gay man or woman in Baghdad instead of here in Singapore or wherever we are living now in relative peace and prosperity?

Do read Ali's story, it may be a bit long, but I can assure you that it's not boring. In it, you will get to meet a kind and charitable gay couple like Jean Philippe de Bliek (41) and Edwin Dadema (48) and you get to discover that Amsterdam is a stopover hub in the great gay Underground Railroad for gay people in search of freedom.

On a slightly different note, I find it kind of ironical that this whole chaos that is Iraq now is a result of Bush's attempt to liberate that country from tyranny, oppression and dictatorship.

It's obvious to anyone that the country now is in the grips of something that is way more oppressive, tyrannical and dictatorial than Saddam Hussein. That tyrannical dictator is chaos and hate, and it emanates not just from one single source like Saddam, but from a host of people, known or unknown, influential and powerful or not, and armed with some very serious weapons and an awful agenda. It seems like the country was kicked out of purgatory and directly into hell.

And on the subject of Bush, I read this very interesting article on Yahoo News (directed there by my sister) recently.The rest of the article is available via the linked title above.

Thank god Bush's term is ending soon. But sadly, the chaos he created in Iraq will not disappear when his term ends. I frankly doubt if it's going to end anytime soon.

Labels: bush, iraq, lgbt