AKA William

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I’ve written quite a bit about the murders of gay Iraqis by members of extremist groups within Iraq. Now, those murderers have taken their hatred, sickeningly, online :

Sitting on the floor, wearing traditional Islamic clothes and holding an old notebook, Abu Hamizi, 22, spends at least six hours a day searching internet chatrooms linked to gay websites. He 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 using a stream of homophobic invective. “Animals deserve more pity than the dirty people who practise such sexual depraved acts,” he told the Observer. “We make sure they know why they are being held and give them the chance to ask God’s forgiveness before they are killed.”

One mother, who had to identify her son’s remains, said, “”We found his body with signs of torture, his anus filled with glue and without his genitals. I will carry this image with me until my dying day.”

This is beyond imagining.

Dr Toby Dodge, of London University’s Queen Mary College, believes that the increase in homophobic violence can be traced to the fall of Saddam Hussein and the rise of Islamic extremists attempting to fill the power vacuum.