The Islamic State extremist group has claimed responsibility for killing at least 30 people for sodomy, the head of an international gay rights organization said on Monday at the first-ever UN Security Council meeting spotlighting violence and discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people.
“It’s about time, 70 years after the creation of the UN, that the fate of LGBT persons who fear for their lives around the world is taking center stage,” said US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power, who organized the meeting with Chile’s UN envoy. “This represents a small, but historic, step.”
Diplomats said two of the 15 council members, Chad and Angola, did not attend the informal, closed meeting.
International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission executive director Jessica Stern told the council that courts established by the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria claim to have punished sodomy with stoning, firing squads and beheadings and by pushing men from tall buildings.
Fear of the extremist group, which controls about a third of Syria and Iraq, has fueled violence by others against LGBT individuals, she said.
Subhi Nahas, a gay refugee from the Syrian city of Idlib, told the council that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government “launched a campaign accusing all dissidents of being homosexuals” when that country’s uprising started in 2011. Soon afterward, gay hangouts were raided and many people were arrested and tortured.
“Some were never heard from again,” he said.
When the al-Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front took Idlib in 2012, he said, its militants announced “they would cleanse the town of those involved in sodomy,” and arrests and executions of accused homosexuals followed.
Last year, when the Islamic State took the city, the violence worsened, he said.
“At the executions, hundreds of townspeople, including children, cheered jubilantly as at a wedding,” Nahas said. “If a victim did not die after being hurled off a building, the townspeople stoned him to death. This was to be my fate too.”
Stern stressed that persecution of LGBT people in Iraq and Syria began long before the emergence of the Islamic State group and called for UN action to relocate LGBT persons most in need and for bringing the gay community into broader human rights and humanitarian initiatives among other things.
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