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WARNING: This story contains graphic content

By Peter Graff

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BAGHDAD — The man holds up two pictures of his friend, which tell the story of what it now means to be gay in Iraq.

One photograph, which the man keeps on his mobile phone, is a portrait of a handsome youth with a stylish haircut. The other, a printed snapshot taken last month, shows the body of the same young man lying sprawled in the back of a white pickup truck, his head disfigured by blunt trauma.

According to a police report, Saif Asmar was found bludgeoned to death in the afternoon on February 17.

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“They laid him down on the pavement and smashed his head with a cement block,” said his 25-year-old friend, who works as a doctor’s assistant and also as a gay activist under the pseudonym Roby Hurriya. He did not disclose his real name.

Homosexuals have lived in fear in Iraq for years, notably since religious militia claimed control of the streets in the sectarian warfare that followed the U.S.-led invasion of 2003, which toppled Saddam Hussein. But Hurriya — whose adopted surname means “Freedom” in Arabic — says a surge in killings in the past two months is by far the worst he has seen.