Gay Syrians are being targeted by jihadis who pose as homosexual in order to entrap and ransom them.

At least one kidnapping occurred in Raqqa, Syria, in 2013, reported the The Daily Beast.

“Karim” and “Tareq” were on their second date and had just finished dinner when Karim was attacked by five men. They put a bag over his head, gagged him, and drove him away. Karim realized his date had trapped him after hearing Tareq and his captors talk about ransom.

After two weeks of negotiations, Karim’s family paid a ransom and he was released. Writes Daily Beast reporter Amelie Zaccour:

Tareq had been posing as a gay man but working with a group linked to Jabhat al Nusra, according to Karim, in order to entrap homosexuals, a not uncommon practice in war-torn Syria. Al Nusra, the anti-Assad militia most closely associated with al Qaeda, had picked up one of Karim’s friends and got a list of numbers from his phone to track down other gay people.

When Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad was still firmly in power, Syrians caught living a homosexual lifestyle only had to paid a fine, Karim told The Daily Beast.

Now, jihadi organizations are vying for control of the country, imposing fundamentalist interpretations of Islam.

Islamic State militants pushed a gay man in his twenties off a ledge and stoned him to death when he didn’t die from the fall in Raqqa. In January, the group’s jihadis threw another homosexual man off a building in Mosul, Iraq.

The terrorist organization may use the allegation of being gay as a pretext for killing anyone opposed to Islamic State rule, according to Agence France Press.

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