Speaking by telephone from London, Hili said that “there is a very, very serious threat to life for gay people in Iraq today.
His anti-gay fatwa-available on Sistani’s official Web site-says that “people involved” in homosexuality “should be killed in the worst, most severe way of killing.” The Ayatollah Sistani, the 77-year-old Iranian-born cleric who is the supreme Shia authority in Iraq, is revered by SCIRI as its spiritual leader. The SCIRI’s Badr Corps is trained and commanded by former Iraqi army officers.
The well-armed Badr Corps is the military arm of the Iranian-backed Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), the powerful Shia group that is the largest political formation in Iraq’s Shia community, and was headquartered in exile in Tehran until Saddam Hussein’s fall. The Badr Corps in Iraq has recently begun to use this tactic to identify and hunt down Iraqi gays. In the Islamic Republic of Iran, the regime of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been carrying out a lethal anti-gay pogrom, notably through entrapment schemes carried out on the Internet.
“We believe that the Badr Corps is receiving advice from Iran on how to target gay people,” Hili told Gay City News.
